Nine months on a plate

The first product we ever commissioned for StyleMart Home was the Noor dinner plate, and it took nine months.

When you start a brand, you are tempted to chase a wide catalogue. Reach for twenty pieces, each fine, each slightly thin. What we chose to do instead was open with ten pieces, each as good as we could make them. The plate was the first of those ten.

We travelled to Caldas da Rainha, a small pottery town two hours north of Lisbon, in October 2019. The pottery we chose — which I won't name, on their request — has been making for designers for three generations. They had been through Zara Home in my years there. They knew how to work to a spec. What they had not done before, they told us, was work with a new brand that wanted to push the weight up rather than down.

Every homeware brand you can name tries to reduce the weight of a dinner plate. Shipping is per-kilogram, and breakage scales with weight. A lighter plate is cheaper to land.

We went the other direction. A Noor plate is 628 grams. The category average is 410. It feels, in the hand, like a plate your grandmother owned. That heft is what we paid for in the nine months — reformulating the clay, rebalancing the firing, adjusting the foot so the weight sits right when it's stacked.

The glaze was the easy part. The reactive rim came in the second sample. The colour — a soft ivory with trace iron that makes the speckle — was the third sample. We signed off in June 2020.

The plate is now what we all eat off at the studio lunch table. It is also what our founders give as housewarmings. After six years of use, not one has chipped. Nine months well spent.