Kōen is a family pottery in the hills north-east of Kyoto, run by a mother and her son, who make tableware in a wood-fired kiln that is lit twice a year. When they asked us for a new identity and an online shop, we asked whether we could work alongside them for a week before we drew anything. They agreed, on the condition that we actually worked.

the week

We arrived in March, in time for the spring firing. Three of us, from both studios, slept in a guesthouse at the bottom of the hill and walked up at seven each morning. We wedged clay, split and stacked two tonnes of red pine, and learned to load a chamber of the kiln without touching the pots on either side. By the third day our hands were cut and our notebooks were full.

The firing lasts four days and nights. Someone feeds the kiln every seven minutes, in shifts, while the temperature climbs to around 1,300 degrees. We took the night shift on the second day with Ren, the son, and spent most of it in silence, listening to the fire. At around three in the morning he explained that the ash falling on the pots becomes the glaze, and that nobody can predict exactly where it will land. That sentence became the brief.

what we brought home

The identity we eventually made is built on that idea of controlled chance. The logotype was drawn once with a brush and then left alone. Product photographs are taken in the pottery’s own daylight, against the unpainted wall of the drying room. Every bowl in the online shop has its own page, because no two come out of the kiln alike, and each page records which chamber it was fired in and where the ash settled.

Nobody can predict exactly where the ash will land. That sentence became the brief.

None of this would have come from a video call. We could have described a wood-fired kiln from research, but we would not have known the smell of the drying room or the weight of a finished bowl, and those turned out to be the details that mattered.

Ren’s mother said very little to us all week. On the last morning she handed each of us a bowl from the autumn firing and asked us to use it every day until the identity was finished, so that we would not forget what we were designing for. Mine held coffee on my desk in Lisbon for the next five months.

is it worth the week?

A week away costs a client money and costs us a week. We cannot do it on every project, and we do not pretend to. But when the making is the story, as it is for a pottery, a winery or a coffee roaster, we now ask for time on site before we ask for anything else. The cracked bowl, for the record, sits on a shelf in Lisbon. It was ours, and Ren says it was the best thing we made all week.