Name: Ethereal Series
Brand: Cardoon Studio Store
Price: 1600.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

Ethereal Series

£1,600.00

Ethereal Series

£1,600.00

★★★★★ Rated 4.8 on Google · Read reviews

A curated selection
Three of our most iconic albarelli shape vases.
Hand-thrown in Spain by skilled craftsmen
Tin-glaze & lustreware finish
Hand-painted with gold & copper oxides
Size: 30 cm height x 12 cm diametre
Made to order, ships in 3 weeks

30 cm height x 12 cm diameter
2.20 kg
Handmade in Spain
Wipe gently with a soft, dry cloth
Avoid abrasive cleaners or dishwasher use

Position on a windowsill or console where natural light can deepen the cobalt glaze.
Display with a few wildflowers or grasses for a sense of movement and calm.
Group with other blue or neutral-toned vessels for a layered, tranquil vignette.

Lustreware did not merely decorate the Mediterranean — it moved through it like a currency of culture and identity. Developed by Islamic artisans in ninth-century Mesopotamia, the technique travelled west through North Africa, taking root in Al-Andalus and finding its most enduring home in the workshops of Valencia and Manises, where families structured their lives around the kiln for generations.

Knowledge was never written down; it passed from parent to child through proximity, repetition, and an intimacy with fire and clay that accumulated over lifetimes. That continuity survived conquest, displacement, and industrialisation — carried by communities who understood that to lose the technique was to lose something of themselves.

What remains today is not nostalgia. It is a living practice, still rooted in the same Valencian soil, still held in the hands of makers whose identity has always been inseparable from what they make.

Handmade in Valencia from local pink clay, each piece is finished using lustreware — a technique developed in the region over a thousand years ago and still practised by only a handful of makers. The clay body is fired twice: first to set the form, then a second time in a traditional reduction kiln with rosemary leaves, starving the atmosphere of oxygen and forcing metallic oxides in the glaze to bond to the surface. The result is an iridescent finish that shifts with the light — not a coating, but a transformation of the material itself.

This is what Glenn Adamson, in Fewer Better Things*, calls 'material intelligence' — a knowledge that lives not just in the hands, but in an understanding of how clay responds to heat, how fire behaves without oxygen, and how a surface that cannot be entirely controlled is precisely what makes it irreplaceable.