The museum exists because of a ceramicist who changed materials. Finn Lynggaard, born in 1930, was teaching at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, when he ran into the studio glass movement — the shift, beginning in the early 1960s, that treated glass as a medium for independent sculptors rather than a material craftsmen shaped to a designer's specification for firms like Tiffany & Co. It changed the direction of his career. After raising the profile of glass in Gothenburg, London and elsewhere in Europe, he moved in 1980 to Ebeltoft, a place some of his students regarded as a wilderness, and set up a glassblowing studio. In 1986 he and Tchai Munch founded the museum, which opened its doors on 8 June that year. It has never belonged to the state: a private foundation, the Foundation for the Collection of Contemporary International Studio Glass, administers it. Lynggaard died in 2011.

The building was not made for art. Ebeltoft's Customs and Excise House went up in 1921 to the designs of Hack Kampmann — who was born in Ebeltoft in 1856 and became one of Denmark's foremost architects — and his son Christian, who saw the work through. There is a certain justice in it: a building put up to tax goods passing through the harbour now houses objects that came here as gifts. In 2006 the complex gained a modern wing by the architects 3XN, along with an enclosed garden and a purpose-built glassblowing studio, paid for by a coalition of foundations, the Ministry of Culture and the local authority. The museum also runs a library, a shop and a café.

That studio is not decoration. The hot shop gives public demonstrations and runs seminars for students of glass, which means visitors can watch the material behave — gathered molten on the end of a blowpipe, glowing orange, obedient for a few seconds and then not. Upstairs, the museum mounts four to six exhibitions a year, mixing experimental work by young makers in group and solo shows with new pieces from established names. Museum staff organise the shows themselves and publish catalogues in several languages for an international readership, and the exhibitions travel: Glasmuseet's own productions have been lent to museums in China, England, Finland, Germany and the United States. For a small institution on the Djursland coast, the outward flow of shows matters as much as the inward flow of visitors.

The collection reads like a map of studio glass. From the United States there is Harvey Littleton, a founding figure of the American studio glass movement, along with Dale Chihuly, Marvin Lipofsky, Joel Philip Myers, Paul Stankard, Toots Zynsky and Dante Marioni. Czech glass arrives through Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, whose cast sculptures work at architectural scale, and through Václav Cigler, Jiří Harcuba and René Roubíček. Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto bring the Venetian tradition; Klaus Moje, Gerry King and Nick Mount come from Australia; Erwin Eisch and Ann Wolff from Germany; Sybren and Durk Valkema from the Netherlands; Gunnar Cyrén, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien and Göran Wärff from Sweden. Lynggaard and Munch are in there too, alongside the rest. Almost all of it came directly from the artists themselves, as gift or loan, rather than through the market.

Because the museum receives no direct financial support from the Danish government, it lives on the business community around it. Its three principal sponsors are the textile company Kvadrat, Djursland Bank and the energy company NRGi, with further support from Primagaz, Montana Møbler, Blue Water Shipping, Cerama and Mols Linien. A Friends Society of roughly 900 members supplies volunteers. Around 50,000 people come through the doors in a year — a large number for a town this size, and a small one for a collection of this standing. The institution now goes by Glas, Museet for Glaskunst, but the old name has not entirely let go, and the harbour building it occupies has not changed at all.