Studio Visits: Cath and Jeremy Brown, founders of Devon-based creative studio Feldspar, discuss fine bone china and keeping craft alive

In 2015, Jeremy and Cath Brown upped sticks from Hackney for a rented house on the edge of Dartmoor. Quitting their jobs – Jeremy worked for the UN and Cath was an architectural designer – the couple decided to give themselves a few months to take stock. After the acquisition of a pottery wheel and a few experiments, they came up with the idea of Feldspar, a creative studio through which they would craft thoughtful homewares that were designed to last. Launched at the end of 2016, the brand now offers fine bone china tableware, as well as soaps, candles and lambswool blankets, and is stocked by the likes of Matches, Alex Eagle and The Conran Shop.

Here, we visit them at their Dartmoor studio and talk about turning a hobby into a business, the importance of keeping endangered crafts alive and why this is only the beginning of their plan.

Jeremy: “What we make today is massively influenced by being in Devon, because it has given us the space and time that we could never quite get in London. I often wonder how anyone can create anything different in London when you’re constantly bombarded with new things.

“We moved here on a complete whim when I swapped Leyton for Devon in a property search engine and discovered you could buy palaces down here for the same price as a parking space in east London.”

Cath: “Our first child, Milo, had just been born and it sort of made sense to quit our jobs and take three months off. Jeremy’s parents lived down here, so we found somewhere to rent, and spent our time growing vegetables, reading Nigel Slater cookbooks and throwing pots on a wheel that we bought from a man on the moors. We were living like 60-year-olds!”

Jeremy: “We learnt how to create ceramics by reading books, and we’d then drive our very fragile stoneware creations across the bumpy moor to have them fired. We set ourselves a target by inviting both our families for Christmas and pledging to make enough plates and mugs for all of them, as well as the table we’d eat off. I’d worked for a boat builder in Devon after studying furniture and 3D design at university in London, so I went back to him and made the table.

“We hand threw the ceramics, using a lot of woodworking techniques and tools. Compared to woodwork, pottery was just so accessible – we could make a mug on our kitchen table, but we couldn’t really make a kitchen table on a kitchen table.”

Cath: “We thought about returning to our old jobs, but quickly realised that we wanted to find a way to prolong what we were doing. We’d always discussed the idea of setting up something together when our children had grown up and decided that now was actually the right time to do it. We launched Feldspar in late 2016, and it’s named after a mineral found in clay.

“Ceramics seemed like a good place to begin, as we could make pieces that people needed for daily life. Our starting point is always to think about what we need for our house, which at the beginning was a coffee cup. The rest of the collection has grown from there to include teapots, butter dishes, jugs and tea strainers.

“We’ve always liked the idea of taking heritage objects and rethinking them for contemporary life. Everything was made so much better in the past and right from the start we committed to creating pieces that would be made properly and designed to last. Our lambswool blankets are made by a family-owned mill in the Scottish borders, while the beeswax candles are made locally by a man who gathers wax from his own hives on the moor.

“The tableware we make reflects our love for traditional blue and white china, although we’ve expanded our offering to include different coloured rims and handles. We did a green collection for Alex Eagle and a limited edition geranium colour, which we’re hoping to bring back as we get emails about it almost every week.”

Jeremy: “We started working with fine bone china and the process of slip-casting relatively early on – it’s strong, but can be made so thin. We began working with a family-run pottery up in Stoke on Trent, who we’d send our prototypes to for them to make larger runs. There are only a few factories up there that still slip cast, as it’s now regarded as a critically endangered craft. Although we now make more and more pieces here in Devon, we’ll always work with the pottery in Stoke. We want to play our part in keeping those heritage skills alive.

“Slip casting is labour intensive. It all starts with a plaster model, which we make about 15% larger than we want the final ceramic to be. We then make moulds from this, which we pour liquid bone china clay into. We leave it for about 10 minutes and then you’re left with a vessel, which we take out to dry for a few days.

“Each piece is fired three times – the first is the hottest at 1232°C. We fire it for a second time once it’s been glazed and for the third time after we’ve hand-painted the mug handles and rims of the plates and bowls. Frustratingly, this is the most volatile firing stage and where we end up with the most rejects.”

Cath: “Our roles aren’t clean-cut, but Jeremy is generally the maker, while I focus more on marketing and branding. We’ll generally sketch new ideas together, and then Jeremy will go to the workshop and trial a few pieces, which we’ll edit together. We’re currently working on a collection of bone china lampshades in collaboration with Bath-based design practice Berdoulat.

“In January 2019 we moved to our workshop, which is now a 20-minute drive from our home. Until then we’d been making from home, which was quite difficult as we didn’t have enough power to run the kiln. This workshop was an old Victorian barn on a farm, which hadn’t been inhabited by humans for about 100 years. When we moved in it didn’t have doors or a roof in some places.”

Jeremy: “It took us until the summer to seal the space properly, and it was quite difficult in the early days trying to make fine bone china cups in two pairs of long johns, with builders dust all around you! We’re currently in just one end of the barn, but we’re in the process of taking over the whole building, which will triple the space in size. We’ll have room for more kilns and we’ll be able to accommodate our growing team – there’s currently eight of us.

“Our goal is to be able to build our own house and make everything we need for it in the next five to ten years. We’re just in the process of setting up a woodworking studio at our home, and we’ve started off by making a clothes airer and a bath caddy.

“Eventually we’d love to be able to make kitchens and set up metalworking and glassblowing workshops. We’d love our home and workshops to be one, surrounded by woodland that we could coppice for our pieces. Hopefully, we’ll have rare breed animals and use their wool for upholstery, and grow our own ingredients for sustainable and organic skincare products. Our focus will always be on labour-intensive crafts and finding ways to preserve them.”

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