Alu Ceramic Floral Vase

The name is short for aluminum, which the vase impersonates and is not. An alu vase, in this studio's usage, is fired clay under a chrome glaze polished until it passes for machined metal, in pictures and mostly in person, right up until someone lifts it and finds kiln weight instead of alloy. The name confesses the trick up front. The surface still fools people.

They are the intended crop. The Alu holds stems at a relaxed sideways angle rather than bolt upright, and short garden cuttings — pansies, cosmos, a stray zinnia — drape naturally along that line. Long formal stems fight the low profile and lose. Trim short, lay the bloom toward the mirror finish, and let the reflection double your flower count. Short and casual wins here.

The large measures five inches long, two inches wide, and two and a half tall — a low horizontal strip rather than a column, sized for the front edge of a mantel or a narrow console. The small is a two-inch rounder that tucks in almost anywhere. Neither blocks a sightline, which is the advantage of designing low. Horizontal room is all they ask.

The ceramic body is as tough as anything in the catalog; the mirror glaze deserves ordinary courtesy. Fired clay handles daily life — water, handling, the occasional bump — without complaint, and unlike genuine chrome-plated metal, it cannot dent or peel. Fingerprints wipe away with a soft cloth. Treat the finish like eyeglasses rather than armor. The body will outlast the fashion.

Hand wash — the studio is firm on this one. Dishwasher detergents are mildly abrasive by design, and over many cycles they haze exactly the kind of high-polish surface the Alu depends on. Warm water, mild soap, a soft cloth, and a dry buff restores the mirror in under a minute. Machines wash well enough. Mirrors deserve better.

That is most of its life. The Alu functions as a small chrome-look sculpture that happens to accept stems — in industrial and modern rooms it holds shelf space empty for months at a stretch, reflecting whatever the room does around it. Flowers arrive as an event, not a requirement. It was styled that way on purpose. Empty is the default.

The Alu is a material joke; the Astronaut is a character. One is clay committed to a chrome impression, abstract and low, at home in strict modern rooms. The other is a figure — a person in a suit, holding flowers, carrying a whole space-program backstory. Choose the Alu for finish, the Astronaut for narrative. They share a shelf surprisingly well.

It started in 2018 as a glaze experiment: how far could a chrome finish go on fired clay before it stopped reading as ceramic at all. The answer required the studio's slowest glaze runs and its highest rejection rate, plus a hand-polish step nobody has managed to shorten. The form stayed simple so the surface could carry everything. The finish was the whole project.