When Eunice Byun and David Nguyen, co-founders of Material Kitchen, decided to add plates and bowls to their direct-to-consumer line of essential kitchen products, Seoul-based ceramicist Hye-Rin Yang of Soil Baker came to mind immediately. “We had admired Hye-Rin’s work in New York City restaurants,” recalls Byun. “So we simply reached out to her via email and luckily she responded right away.”
Each shape of the four-piece ceramics collection—which comes in two shades, Dune and Grotto—was hand-thrown by Yang on her potter’s wheel using clay with a custom blend of five types of natural Korean soil for a gently grained texture that changes in the light.
Luxe caught up with Byun to learn more about working with Yang and her new collection.
Tell us about the collaboration. We loved Soil Baker’s ability to bring elegance and high performance together. To us, one’s tabletop collection should feel multilayered and personal, almost collected.
What do you love about ceramics? I love that people’s cabinets are reflecting range versus a boxed set of matchy-matchy items. You can intermix colors and shapes, you can layer in a really funky side bowl or serving bowl and they feel good together—the pieces themselves, they literally feel good. The texture is so luxuriously raw.
How do you envision people using this collection? Every day, for every meal.
