Chalet piercings - the “forato” pieces

In the art glass world, "forato" means "pierced" or "with a hole" in Italian and is specifically referring to art glass featuring deliberate openings. This design style originated in the 1950’s by master glassmakers in Murano, Italy. It is most famously associated with pieces designed by Fulvio Bianconi for the renowned Venini glasshouse. While primarily a Murano phenomenon (including makers like Archimede Seguso), both Chalet Artistic Glass and EDAG also pierced some of their glass. In Chalet’s case, this happened very rarely with EDAG forato forms being much more common.

 Creating "forato" pieces requires immense skill. The glassmaker must blow the molten glass and then manipulate the walls inward to fuse perfectly together, while leaving a finished, polished opening in the center. This is very time consuming and as Chalet was a factory, time was money. Therefore, this is probably the reason that Chalet forato was limited and most likely confined to the very first year of operation.

 One style of pierced glass was featured on Chalet’s 1962 “Items Available” catalogue page. It is item A40.