FEATURE
“Garden” by Blue Green Works
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Collection Highlight
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One of the studios that’s stuck with us the most over the past few years is @bluegreenworks. There’s a clarity to what Peter B. Staples is building that’s hard to fake. It feels shaped by years of experience and taste, but also carries the vitality of a designer finally building something under his own name, pushing ideas forward in real time. That mix shows up across the studio’s DNA, in earlier collections that pull from skateboarding, film, modernism, and tattoos, and in how he’s been thinking about Blue Green Works as more than just another design practice.
That way of thinking expands with Garden, their latest collection, released April 1. It’s the studio’s first body of work that leans directly into something personal, developed after the passing of Staples’s mother. He wanted to create something heartbreaking, and the clear glass pieces hover between presence and absence, their luminous glow suggesting apparition and ascent.
Garden reimagines Baroque ornamentation through sustained collaboration with Murano glass artisans. Rather than leaning on glassblowing for pure expression, Staples worked within the lineage’s feather and leaf iconography, stripping it back to focus on structure and light. As an American designer working within a centuries-old Italian tradition, he engages the history without getting stuck in it.
The collaboration unfolded in a way that feels true to the work. Murano glassblowing is built on repetition, control, and deep technical knowledge. To get the leaves and feathers to feel like they’re drifting, Staples and the artisans developed what he calls “a calibrated system of difference” — slight shifts in scale, length, and orientation that build variation across the whole. Traditional Murano fixtures often hide their construction beneath layers of glass. Here, Staples leaves more of it exposed. You see how things connect, how the parts come together, which gives the pieces a kind of directness that runs through all of Blue Green Works.
It’s an exciting moment for the studio, and for us to watch where it goes next. Every collection is an obvious step, getting closer to the full picture of what Blue Green Works can become.
Garden is your first collection that engages directly with personal narrative, developed after the passing of your mother. You’ve described wanting to create something “heartbreaking,” and the clear glass pieces seem to hover between being there and not being there. How did working through grief change your relationship to ornament and spectacle, and what did you find about holding emotion within structure?
When I am working on a collection, I usually try to zoom out emotionally, blur my eyes. There is something I’m aiming to capture, but it’s more of a summary of various vibes and feelings. I am looking to create objects that can hold a lot at once. Garden was really about focusing on beauty, using another vocabulary to do that was kind of freeing. It’s maybe hiding a bit, but that’s what the next collection or the next one is about. I was feeling fragile, and I wanted something that echoed that. I wanted something to lilt and emote but also to hold strong. It’s important that the glass gets activated by the light, that it becomes alive. It’s about an ascension.
You describe the process as “borrowing the emotional vocabulary of another language” while working within historic feather and leaf iconography. How did you engage with Murano tradition as an American designer without falling into nostalgic reproduction?
I spent a lot of time looking at the long story of Murano, the different eras and contributors. I wanted to pull more iconic embellishments from the larger history, rather than a moment. The leaves and feathers belong to something so old and so ubiquitous, I don’t think nostalgia can touch it. It carries a very old emotion.
The collaboration with Murano maestros required developing “a calibrated system of difference” to achieve forms that appear to drift organically. What did that process teach you about the relationship between precision and whimsy, and how did the artisans push back or guide your approach?
Glassmaking is a precise craft. The masters making these pieces have spent their lives developing their skill. Every inflection of the glass has to be designed and planned for. To create variation and perceived organicness for the Landscape became about developing eight different leaves that could achieve a sense of controlled randomness. I think true to Blue Green Works, you still sense systems and rhythms, and in part, that’s what draws you in.
You’ve made construction visible in these pieces rather than concealing it beneath layered glass, which is a departure from traditional Murano fixtures. What motivated that decision, and how does it relate to the clarity of construction that’s defined Blue Green Works from the beginning?
The Vertical Pendant is the best example of this in the collection. We exposed the plaster cups that usually hold the glass leaves and ornaments, painting them to match the metal. The leaves themselves attach to the pendant structure by magnet, and LEDs within the body light each leaf. It feels like this crazy ancient future thing to me.
You studied film before moving into design, and you’ve talked about film being the nexus of your interests in architecture, fashion, and narrative. How does that cinematic way of thinking show up in how you approach designing objects or building a world around Blue Green Works?
This is where the zooming out comes into play. Having trained myself to think of films, or movements, genres, or directors’ oeuvre in both broad and specific terms, to distill down to a single example or gesture that can represent the complexities of the whole –that’s what I am doing. The way I think about the studio relates to this. We are telling a long story, and parts of that story are becoming clearer now, but I am not quick to define it. That’s about looking back, and right now I am just trying to look forward.
Your influences range from Horace Gifford’s Fire Island modernism to skateboarding half-pipes to tattoo iconography and heraldry. Garden draws from Baroque ornament but through a completely different lens. How do you decide which references to pull from for a given collection, and what makes something worth translating into your design language?
For Garden, it was about wanting to make something my mom would think was beautiful. There is nothing she loved more than her garden. She would love to tell me what was blooming. The baroque ornamentation of Murano felt like the most native thing; a kind of unmitigated beauty.
I got to spend a lot of time in Venice working on this, and the more I’m there, the less sense the beauty makes. It’s unimaginably beautiful. Beauty for the sake of beauty.
You’ve worked with everyone from Pacific Northwest glass artisans to upstate fabricators who usually make bicycle frames, and now Murano maestros with centuries of tradition behind them. What does moving between those different worlds of making give you that you wouldn’t get by staying in one?
It gives me new experiences. Of the world, of myself, of the work. The reason I started Blue Green Works was because I wanted to make great work and work with great people. I wanted this to feel fun and big.
Garden feels like a significant evolution for the studio, both materially and emotionally. As Blue Green Works continues to grow, how are you thinking about what comes next? Does this collection signal a shift toward more personal or narrative-driven work, or was this a singular moment?
I am still gaining confidence as a designer, as a brand. I believe that with confidence comes freedom. I hope the work gets more and more free somehow. Whether that’s materially or emotionally, we will find out. I definitely have a lot of emotions.
