Collection: Astier de Villatte

Founded in Paris in 1996 by Ivan Pericoli and Benoît Astier de Villatte, who met as students at the École des Beaux-Arts, the maison makes everything by hand using pre-industrial techniques that have largely disappeared elsewhere. The material is black terracotta, extracted from Parisian quarries, worked by Tibetan ceramicists into forms finished with a soft, milky glaze that settles into the clay's natural irregularities rather than concealing them. Imperfection is the point. No two pieces are identical, each carrying its own quiet character, the trace of the hands that made it. The world extends beyond ceramics into fragrance and incense, into objects designed less to be looked at than lived with — things that scent a room, hold a candle, accumulate slowly on a shelf until they become indistinguishable from the place itself.