Caufield Clay Works/Kevin F Caufield
Making a house a home can be a deeply personal and creative process, whether it’s choosing colors, furnishings, or materials that perfectly reflect your style and personality—and dinnerware is no exception. These don’t have to be pieces you mindlessly move between the cupboard and dishwasher. They can be objects to admire or works of art to express yourself as much as a framed painting or statement couch.
While plenty of retailers offer elegantly uniform sets of dinnerware ready for purchase, there’s something to be said about customizing your own. Consider taking the time to collaborate with a professional to choose the right style, shape, and color to perfectly match the rest of your home.
Caufield Clay Works/Kevin F Caufield
To get the inside scoop on dinnerware design, we spoke with Kevin Caufield of St. Paul’s Caufield Clay Works, a full-time potter of 47 years. His work is used at restaurants around the Twin Cities and sold retail at Minneapolis’ Northern Clay Center, comprising a diverse range of plates, bowls, mugs, teapots, oil dispensers, and more—and his services also include custom dinnerware sets. We connected with Caufield to learn his process and how homeowners can work with him to create one-of-a-kind dinnerware sets.
How do you approach each set and select the details?
I meet with the client to learn about the style they like. Do they like porcelain? Do they like stoneware? Then we start looking at glazes, and sometimes people will take samples to see how it would look in their home. The client picks out shapes and colors and design, and sometimes it can be quite difficult if it’s a couple and each person has a different approach to how the dinnerware set should be. It can get tricky at times to manage people’s emotions and wanting each person to get what they want out of the set—and sometimes compromises must be met.
How do you navigate obstacles during the process?
With clay, anything can go wrong at any time, so I have to be able to navigate and think creatively about how to get around obstacles. Also, with pottery, you don’t always get the color that you were looking for, sometimes the kiln does its own thing and sometimes it’s a happy accident.
Do you have some tips for homeowners who might not know the look or style they want?
Take it slow. Taking pieces home and seeing how they fit in your home can be tricky, but it also can be fun!
What’s your favorite part of the process?
My favorite part of the process is always the creating—it’s the thing I get to do the least being a business owner, sitting down at the wheel with a lump of clay and making something that is going to be used by a client or at a restaurant. I get a lot of joy at the fact that my pottery is in so many restaurants and so many people are eating off of what I have created. It’s the one thing that I think almost every potter loves—people using their work!
Read this next: A Guide to the Twin Cities Ceramics Scene
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