A family workshop that has been casting and turning white porcelain for three generations — the studio behind every cup and vase we carry.
Third generationFamily workshop of six
Dehua has made white porcelain since the Ming dynasty, and the town's entire economy still turns on it. The workshop we work with is a family one: three generations on the same lane, with the moulds for forms they have been making for decades stacked in the rafters, some of them cut by hand before the current makers were born.
Their porcelain is unusually pale and dense — what European traders used to call blanc de Chine — because the local clay is very low in iron. That whiteness is the point of the studio. It leaves nowhere for a flaw to hide: an uneven wall, a slumped rim or a bad glaze line is visible immediately in daylight.
For our objects the workshop casts and then turns each piece on the wheel to true it, which is slower than moulding alone but keeps the wall thin. The Quiet Cup is wiped clean at the rim before firing so the lip stays bare; the Plum Branch vase is left unglazed outside and sealed within. Both decisions come from the studio, not from us.
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