Day 18: Today's Pick — Pondhouse Pottery Mugs (Or: I Have a Mug Problem)

Let me be honest about something embarrassing: I own seventeen mugs and use four. Three of those four are from Pondhouse Pottery, a two-person operation in central Vermont, and the fourth is the chunky white restaurant mug that I bought in college. The other thirteen mugs are in a high cabinet for guests, gathering dust.

This is the post where I argue that you should buy one $48 mug and stop buying mugs.

What Pondhouse does

Maddie and Jonas Halperin throw stoneware in a converted barn outside Brattleboro. They make mugs, plates, bowls, vases, and a small line of teapots. The mugs are their volume product and their identity piece. They drop new batches every six weeks. Each batch sells out in about two days.

What makes the mug different

Three things, none of which I expected:

1. Weight distribution. The base is heavier than the lip. This means the mug sits firmly on a counter and feels stable in the hand. It is hard to overstate how much this matters for a daily-use object.
2. The glaze. A satin matte that goes silky-smooth where your fingers touch it. Most matte glazes feel chalky. This one feels like skin.
3. The handle. A pulled handle (made by hand from a strip of clay, not press-molded), with a slight inward curve where your knuckle sits. I genuinely did not realize my hand was tense holding most of my mugs until I held a Pondhouse one.

What it costs

$48 for a 12oz mug. $52 for a 14oz. $60 for the 16oz cappuccino. These are honest prices for hand-thrown stoneware from a small studio. Compare to factory-made mugs ($8) or high-end design-store mugs ($35–60 for production runs in Portugal). You're paying for the labor and the studio.

A word about owning one

The argument for owning a small number of objects you genuinely like, rather than a large number of objects you tolerate, is the most repeated argument on the entire internet. I will not belabor it.

I will, however, say this: I made coffee in a Pondhouse mug this morning, and I have made coffee in a Pondhouse mug every morning for two years. The cumulative effect on my mood is small but real. The cumulative cost is $48, amortized over 730 mornings. The math works.

What I'd do differently

I would not have bought eight of them. I would have bought two. I would have given two as gifts and would not have ended up with a "Pondhouse cabinet."

How to actually buy

pondhousepottery dot com. Sign up for the email list. Restocks happen Friday at noon eastern.

Tomorrow: a children's audiobook I have been recommending to adults.