Ceramic instruments,
by hand.
Earthen Strings is the studio's material experiment — string instruments where ceramic replaces wood as the resonant body. Each piece is hand-formed in porcelain or terracotta and paired with walnut. A small line of one-of-a-kind, luxury commissions. Ninety days from confirmation to your hands.
01
Ukulele
A tenor scale on a hand-formed porcelain body. Bright on the attack, warm in the sustain — sized to be played close.
Read & commission
02
Guitar
Steel-string acoustic with a porcelain body and a walnut neck. The ceramic shell returns the note with a softer attack and a more intimate decay than wood.
Read & commission
03
Oud
A rich tradition reinterpreted in earth. The classical oud form built around a terracotta body — the ancient voice in a new material register.
Read & commissionA clay vessel singing the way a clay vessel must.
Hand-formed, slow-fired. Used for the ukulele and the guitar — fine wall thickness optimised for resonance over rigidity.
Hand-formed, low-fired. Used for the oud — denser, warmer, sympathetic to the instrument's deeper register.
Solid walnut, hand-finished, fitted to the ceramic shoulder. Bone nut and saddle.
A ceramic body returns sound to the listener differently than a wooden one. The attack is softer, the sustain shorter; the instrument prefers a quiet hand and a small room. Porcelain and terracotta do not project the way thin spruce does — what they do is keep the sound a little closer to the player, and let it fade rather than ring.
The instrument is meant to be played close. It does not behave well at the back of a stage, and was never asked to.
The collection,
in detail.
Throughout history, clay has fashioned the resonance chambers of musical instruments. Earthen Strings places ceramic in the foreground — as the membrane itself, the part responsible for producing sound. Can ceramic act as a membrane? The collection is the studio's answer.
The studio combines practices from industrial design — computerised 3D planning and sculpting — with traditional techniques of ceramics and woodworking.
Ceramic is one of human history's most basic raw materials. Here it is used to ask whether the part of an instrument that has always been wood, or skin, can also be earth.
Let's design your instrument, together.
Choose the form — guitar, oud, or ukulele — then the wood, the finish, the colour, the texture. The studio sketches a proposal; if you approve, the vessel is thrown the same week.
The same hand makes for brands too.
Industrial design and product development for SOURCE, CUBE, CAPRA, and others. A different language, a different tempo. Both worlds belong to one studio.