Designer Deborah Ehrlich is renowned for her exquisitely simple crystal glassware, which begins as sketches in her studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. “I didn’t really go to design school. I figured it out from the back door,” she says modestly of her training, which ranged from studying under sculptor Michael Skop in Fort Thomas, Kentucky to a stint at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen, where she was introduced to blown-glass production.

“People often say you design one shape and then you make it bigger sixteen times and then you have a collection. What I found out is that the feeling disappears,” says Ehrlich. Her perfectly proportioned designs, realized in strong, non-lead Swedish crystal by master craftsmen, are, above all, special. And, she asks, "Why shouldn’t you have special things be a part of your everyday life?"