It’s been one year this month, since New York ceramist Danny Kaplan opened his live/work showroom in downtown Manhattan, where clients can view his celebrated lighting and furniture collections in-situ while being immersed in a fully curated environment.

Opening the doors to your home may seem like a risky move, but it’s proven to be quite fruitful. "I was more nervous about it than it's turned out to be. I had some misgivings about being so close to my own work, but it's inspired me,” says Kaplan, who was afraid he’d get bored of looking at the same pieces every day. “I feel like I'm motivated to keep making work and keep the space feeling fresh.”

Step foot inside and you’ll find Kaplan’s ceramics taking all manner of forms, from lighting to furniture to site-specific installations. Cue a ceramic mural featuring a relief pattern set within a dividing wall. “I love the difference in texture that it brings to the room and the sculptural nature of a relief pattern. It breaks up the space in an interesting way and guides your eye in a way that you might not expect,” he says.

Looking at the breadth of his work, you’d never guess that Kaplan, who went to art school and had a painting practice, came to ceramics on a whim in his early 30s. “I had been out to dinner with some friends, and one of them was late because he was coming from his wheel throwing class. He sat down and showed me pictures of what he'd been making on his phone, and instantly, it was like the bug had transferred over to me," Kaplan recalls. He signed up for an eight-week course at La Mano Pottery and the rest is history. 

In the 10 years since that fateful night, Kaplan has become known for crafting elegant table lamps in shapes that nod to Etruscan, midcentury modern, and even Brutalist silhouettes. His work begins as a simple sketch in his notebook, then evolves with a tight-knit team through hand-building or throwing clay on the wheel, depending on the design. Beyond his own line, he champions collaboration and has collections with brands like In Common With and Lesser Miracle, including an ever growing range of furniture. “With clay, going bigger is really exciting. There's such a challenge involved in building large forms,” he says.

Drawing on that painterly background, Kaplan mixes all his glazes at his Brooklyn studio with colours like stone and anthracite, but the palette is purposefully restrained. In part because chemical reactions in the kiln cause different glazes to interact with each other in unintended ways (meaning more colours complicate things) and in part because it’s just nice to keep the aesthetic tight.

The newest colour, agate (a soft blue gray) is also available in a new vessel collaboration that Kaplan has just released with florist Alex Crowder, founder of Field Studies Flora. “It’s great because we're making vessels that really support building arrangements. A lot of vases out there are beautiful, but when it comes to building an arrangement, Alex has found that it requires a frog or some kind of structure inside, and so we were trying to eliminate that process and make something that was truly functional,” he says.

All of which brings Kaplan's work full circle to one of his greatest inspirations—ceramist Hans Coper—who believed, no matter how abstract a vessel might be, it should still behave like a proper vessel.

Photos top to bottom: Marco Galloway (Field Studies Flora vessels); (blue lamp); William Jess Laird (portrait); Adrian Gaut (Odin light); William Jess Laird (Caplan's studio); (Stillmade collaboration table); all courtesy Danny Kaplan Studio