Inspired: Glenn Tutssel The Brand Union

Designers love to cook and I remember seeing a chef prepare cauliflower, courgettes, runner beans, small pickling onions, garlic, tumeric, coriander and ginger to make piccalilli. The ingredients would be boiled, left to cool and put into storage jars. Months later the piccalilli would be transferred to posh ’serving’ containers.

Two identical-cut glass jars used to sit on our kitchen table, one containing chutney and the other piccalilli. Each had a hunting scene engraved into them and they sat in a gleaming silver tray. A delicate silver fork, beautifully engraved with stags, sat across the jars resting on hooks. The whole was inspirational as a total piece of packaging.

Devoid of outer packaging and purely functional, these jars were beautiful and started my love of three-dimensional objects, intricate detail and craft.

However, there were two design flaws: it was impossible to get the contents out of the deep contours of the jars; and the engraving on the glass jars only appeared on the front and stopped half way around so the reverse side was clear. When I saw the back, the ingredients went from looking mouth-watering to something like a specimen jar from the lab of Doctor Frankenstein. The beautiful sculptural ingredients now looked like road kill.