Day 154: Today's Pick — Death's Door Pottery (Wisconsin)

Death's Door is a small studio on Washington Island, Wisconsin — the place at the very tip of Door County, separated from the mainland by a narrow strait that the early French explorers called Porte des Morts, "Death's Door." Two potters live and work there, year-round. They built their kiln out of brick by hand, on the edge of a small forest. They fire it once or twice a season. Each firing is a multi-day process: stack the kiln, light the fire, raise the temperature over thirty-some hours to about 2,400°F, throw fistfuls of rock salt into the firebox at the peak, watch the salt vaporize, watch the vapor settle on the surface of every pot in the kiln, watch a few pieces crack, mourn them, drink coffee, sleep in shifts, open the kiln a week later when it has cooled enough not to thermal-shock everything inside.

What comes out is salt-glazed stoneware.

Salt-glazing — for the curious — is an old, mostly European technique. The salt vaporizes inside the kiln, the sodium reacts with the silica in the clay surface, and the pots come out with a thin, hard, glassy skin that is faintly orange-peeled in texture, slightly crystalline, and often rendered in soft mottled grays and tans and the occasional flash of cobalt blue if the potter has applied a slip beforehand. You cannot fake the surface. Industrial pottery does not bother with salt-glazing because it is too unpredictable, too kiln-intensive, and too sensitive to weather. The few studios in the United States that still do it are doing it because they love it.

Death's Door's pots are functional. This is the part that's important. Their mugs are mugs you can drink from every morning. Their plates are plates you can eat off. Their bowls hold soup. The decorative pieces are mostly small — a candleholder, a vase — and they are, by their nature, slightly heavy. A Death's Door mug weighs roughly twice what a Crate & Barrel mug weighs. This is, in my opinion, the correct weight. Holding a heavy, slightly imperfect, slightly gritty stoneware mug at 7 a.m. is a small act of grounding that lighter, lighter-feeling, machine-extruded mugs simply do not deliver.

I own four pieces from Death's Door. A pair of mugs, a small bread bowl, and a cup that I have come to think of as a tumbler but which is actually labeled as a "yunomi" (a Japanese tea cup, slightly taller than wide). The mugs have, after five years of daily use, developed a faint patina around the rims where my lip has touched them — coffee will, on porous stoneware, slowly stain in the right way over time. The bread bowl has been used for, in addition to bread, a salad, three risottos, and exactly one bowl of cereal during a stomach flu when nothing else was clean.

A few practical notes for first-time buyers. Death's Door does small drops on their website a few times a year — usually a few weeks after each firing. Sign up for the newsletter. Mugs sell out quickly; bowls and plates linger longer. Pricing is in the $40–$120 range for most functional pieces; larger sculptural pieces can be more. Shipping is direct from Washington Island; pieces arrive packed obsessively well, with a hand-typed note on a small card.

Care is simple. Hand wash. Soft sponge. No dishwasher. No microwave (the iron deposits in some clays will spark). Will outlast you and most of your descendants if not dropped on a tile floor.

A small philosophical aside, since this is a pottery review and I owe one. There is a way that handmade objects do not "look" handmade so much as feel handmade after a few days of using them. The Death's Door mugs were not made by a machine. The handle, on each one, is shaped slightly differently from the others. The base has a small fingerprint impression where the potter pressed the foot. The glaze is uneven in a particular, intentional way that no factory pot can replicate. After two weeks of using one, you stop noticing those quirks consciously and start noticing them subconsciously, in your hand, every morning.

That is what handmade pottery is for. It is for grounding the small daily rituals. It is for making coffee feel a little more coffee.

This has been Day 154. The pick is a small Wisconsin studio. Buy a single mug. Use it tomorrow.