Minute Ceramic Pot with Drainage Hole and Saucer 5" — Cosmos

Chive has designed a great many pots, and most of them took the expected amount of time — weeks, months, an unflattering number of abandoned sketches. The Minute took sixty seconds. The honest version is that the designer, demoralized by four mediocre lines of pots, surrendered to a deeply necessary design nap. The Minute arrived fully formed — saucer included — and was sketched in sixty seconds of post-nap haze. The nap has since been added to the official design process.

What emerged is a glazed ceramic plant pot that works as hard as it looks good. Five inches wide, five inches tall — the right size for the standard 4-inch nursery transplant, which drops in as if it were measured for it, because it was.

The most important feature is the drainage hole at the base. Plants do not like sitting in water. This is not controversial, and yet an astonishing number of attractive indoor plant pots proceed as if it were. One center drainage hole. A detachable ceramic saucer that catches whatever comes through it. The surface beneath stays dry. The plant stays alive.

The Blue Layer glaze is applied in three separate dips, each kiln-fired before the next is added. Dipping three times builds real depth — the color shifts with the light, and no two pieces come out of the kiln exactly the same. This is the point, not a side effect.