Utopia — Designer Vase in Ceramic

Hours, not hype — a designer vase like Utopia is built petal by petal by hand, glazed by hand, and fired with the losses every kiln takes, so each finished piece carries the cost of the ones that did not survive. There is no mold, no factory line, and no two alike. The price is the receipt for the making. What arrives is an object that will sit on the same console for decades.

Large by width, not height: the XL Utopia is 43 cm across and 18 cm high, a petal bowl rather than a tall floor vase. The Large is Ø34,5 × 14,5 cm, the Medium Ø23 × 9 cm, and the Small, at Ø18 × 8 cm, sits in one hand. Choose by the surface, not the stem — Utopia is the arrangement even when empty.

No — handwash. The glaze is watertight and rinses clean under a tap; the dishwasher is the one thing we ask you to skip, because heat and detergent dull a hand-mixed glaze over time. Warm water, a soft cloth, and it looks the way it did out of the box.

Each one is built by hand and the glaze pools differently as it fires, so the blue, green or white carries its own variation — deeper in the folds, thinner at the petal edges. That variation is the signature, not a flaw. If two Utopias matched perfectly, one of them would be lying.

Yes — an art gift should be an object the recipient would not have bought for themselves and cannot stop looking at, and Utopia is both: a hand-built ceramic sculpture that also holds flowers. It ships from Rotterdam in a gift-ready box with no duties within the EU. Prices include VAT. The card can say vase. The recipient will say sculpture.

Yes — Utopia's green is an ink green over a pale body, so the white carries the light room and the green anchors it. In a bright, neutral space the vase reads as the one saturated object; in a darker room the white petals lift it. The same piece works in both, which is what a three-colour range is for.

Proportion and purpose — a normal flower vase is a container that waits for flowers; Utopia is a ceramic object that happens to be watertight. It is wide and low, built by hand from overlapping petals, and glazed to vary, so the object leads and the stem follows. For the small ceramic vase that does the everyday job, the Pooley is the answer; Utopia is for the surface that wants one thing on it.

Two — the Pooley bud vase, a small narrow-necked ceramic vase in more than twenty glazes, and Utopia, the ceramic flower vase in blue, green and white on this page. Both are designed in Toronto, made by hand, hand-glazed, watertight and handwash only. Both ship from Rotterdam with no duties within the EU.