_'What could be more magical than a bespoke chandelier?'

Jakimič is the founder of Lasvit, the Czech hand-blown glass manufacturer, which specialises in lighting installations and capitalises on northern Bohemia’s historic link to the craft – dating back to at least 1162.

Jakimič’s family has been involved in the making of glass beads, buttons, goblets, vases and the like for generations. They have contributed to a distinctive regional style. ‘Avant-garde and free-spirited,’ as Jakimič calls it, with a way of working the glass with local pure silica sand so it retains its sparkle for decades. 

It’s a style that was used in the making of the chandeliers in La Leon Jakimič is continuing the Czech tradition of fine glassmaking, reviving time-honoured techniques in his chandeliers, writes JOSH SIMS Scala in Milan and the St Petersburg palaces. It is one that Jakimič has revisited with the launch of his own company a decade ago.

Designers such as Daniel Libeskind, Maarten Baas and Czech glass masters Bořek Šípek and Reneé Roubíček provide some of the spectacular Lasvit forms that have graced the entrances to swankier hotels and apartment blocks, while the company’s 200 glassmakers work on private residential commissions that test the limits of the medium. Like him, these makers are part of a new generation that Jakimič hopes will not only help the artistry survive, but take it forward.

‘Glass is a medium that translates light into something tangible,’ he says. ‘It’s fluid, but neither liquid nor solid. It’s amorphic, and if you have imagination and great designers behind you, amazing things can be done with this material.’