A s showrooms go, it’s unusual. At the far end of the complex of Orsoni Venezia, the only functioning glass factory in Venice (the rest populate the islands of Murano), is a glittering surprise. Past the roaring furnace, through the room where the company’s brilliantly hued mosaic tiles are hand-cut, through the gardens where huge, paper-thin glass bubbles, or sbruffo , bask in the sunshine, and past the magical colour library, where thousands of slabs of glass cataloguing 3,500 vivid colours are neatly stacked on precarious-looking wooden shelves, is a room clad entirely in gold.
It’s also, conveniently, a loo. “We did it because we organised a conference,” Orsoni’s president, Riccardo Bisazza, explains. The room had originally been used to store gold tesserae, made using traditional Byzantine techniques.
As Orsoni points out, a room that used to be a warehouse of gold plates should stay gold, but “we also needed to have a bathroom”..