Classics of everyday design No 10

Useful and bouncy ... the Duralex Picardie glass

I moved home recently. Looking through dozens of cardboard boxes, I couldn't help feeling something was missing. Where were all those Duralex glasses? In the end I found just one, a solitary "Picardie" glass that must have survived more than 10 changes of address over the years. The rest have been lost, broken or, as tempered glass does on rare occasions, simply shattered.

Feeling nostalgic - these are the little workaday French cafe and canteen glasses that many of us have owned since our student days - I thought I should go out and buy a fresh dozen. Easier said than done. Remarkably - remarkably, because the Duralex Picardie glass is one of those designs you expect to soldier on forever - they are getting hard to find.

Of the two original French factories producing them, only one, I think, remains in production, and there has been much changing of ownership/management buy-outs/industrial action there over the past decade. Hopefully, the situation will be resolved and Duralex glasses will remain in production. They are, quite simply, one of the finest and least pretentious examples of 20th- century functional design.

The stackable Picardie glass, with its easy-to-hold faceted sides, dates from 1927. From 1939, the glasses were mass-produced through a tempering and pressing process. This involved heating the glass to 600C and then cooling it very quickly. This gives the glass both great clarity, and strength. It also means that if there is a slight flaw in the glass, the finished product might well implode, or explode. Normally, a Duralex Picardie glass will bounce on a wooden kitchen floor, and yet, occasionally they shatter into a myriad of tiny fragments - piff, poff, comme ca. This, though, happens rarely, and, mostly, the glasses last for decades.

Mine have been used, drinking aside, for storing toothbrushes, razors, screws, pencils, gaskets, car maintenance, mud pies, sandcastles, painting . . . the list seems infinite.

The older glasses, by the way, are much prettier than later ones; they sport slightly flared tops, while the latter are straight edged. Do people collect them? I imagine they do; and yet the Duralex glass is one of those quiet everyday designs that many of us only really think about when down to the very last one, or even none at all. Now, let's raise a glass in the direction of the factory at La Chapelle Saint Mesmin, near Orleans, and trust that supplies of this little design classic will keep heading our way.