Dozens of hand sculpted stripes run top to bottom around this little stoneware pot, each one raised just enough that the cream glaze slides off the ridge and settles beside it, leaving warm buff clay showing through in thin vertical lines. No two pots break the same way. The bottom quarter is left unglazed, a band of raw speckled clay that grounds the whole thing and keeps it from reading as shiny.

It measures four and a half inches in every direction and is built to swallow a standard four inch nursery pot whole, so the plant you carried home in a flimsy plastic pot goes straight in with nothing to repot and no soil on the counter. Inside it is glazed a pale blue white. Put a fern, a pothos or a supermarket basil in it and the pot stops being a container and starts being the thing you look at.