Archive

The Archive is a record rather than a shop. Every piece here has already found a home — several hundred of them now — and none will be remade, because none of them could be. They are kept online so the work stays visible and so it is possible to see what NAF Ceramic has actually been doing since 2019.

Why sold pieces stay online

Most shops delete what they cannot sell again. That made no sense here. Each of these was thrown, painted and fired individually, and taken together they are the only honest picture of how the work has changed — which flowers kept reappearing, when gold detailing started, how the forms got quieter over time.

It is also useful practically. People who liked a piece that sold can see what it was, and can recognise the same hand in something new. A drop that has fully sold moves here rather than disappearing.

What is in it

Everything: hand-painted mugs, tea cups, travel mugs, matcha bowls, plates, pitchers, jewellery and ring dishes, spoon rests, wall pieces, candle holders and ornaments. Botanical work makes up the bulk of it, alongside seasonal pieces, cat pieces and one-off experiments that were never repeated.

The archive can be filtered by type, so it is possible to look only at mugs, or only at bowls, if you are trying to work out what a form usually looks like before buying a current piece.

How to use the archive

Treat it as a reference. If you are deciding between two current mugs, the archive shows how that form has looked across dozens of examples — how tall it sits, how the handle is usually pulled, how much of the surface a botanical design tends to cover.

It is also the fastest way to understand what one of a kind means in practice here. Scroll far enough and you will see the same flower painted twenty times, never identically. That is the clearest argument for hand painting that we can offer.

How these were made

All of it is stoneware. Clay wedged by hand, thrown on the wheel or built from slabs, dried to leather hardness, refined, and painted freehand with underglaze — no transfers, stencils or decals at any point. Then bisque fired, glazed and fired again to 1200°C, with a third cooler firing for anything carrying 24K gold lustre.

A single cup takes about a week from wet clay to finished object, most of that spent waiting for clay to firm and kilns to cool. That pace is why the archive grows slowly and why nothing in it exists twice.

If you are looking for something similar

Nothing here can be reordered, but motifs recur. If a piece in the archive is close to what you want, the current collections are the place to look — Dreamy Garden for botanical work, Blue Floral for cobalt on white, Minimal for quieter surfaces — and new pieces appear regularly in drops.

For something built around a specific name, date or phrase, the Personalized collection is painted to order.

Caring for a piece you already own

If you bought something that now lives in this archive, the same guidance applies as to everything else: warm water and a soft sponge, no abrasive scourers, and no sudden temperature changes. Let a cold piece warm before pouring boiling water in, and keep gold-detailed pieces out of the microwave.

If a glaze has dulled over years of washing, that is usually abrasive cleaning rather than age, and it cannot be reversed — which is the main reason we mention sponges so often.

Stoneware fired to 1200°C is genuinely durable. Handled sensibly these outlive the people who buy them, which is the only real argument for making things this slowly.

Where it was all made

Every piece in the archive was shaped, painted and fired in a small atelier in Kütahya, in western Türkiye — a town that has been producing ceramics for roughly six hundred years. The work has since reached five continents and more than fifteen countries, packed by hand each time.