In home design, a new heavyweight has emerged: the towering clay pot. These enormous ceramic vessels have become a recurring feature in Architectural Digest home tours, appearing everywhere from marble-clad California kitchens to rustic Canadian farmhouses. The trend signals a shift toward interiors that value history and character over sterile perfection.
In a Laguna Beach home, a pitted limestone vessel adds height and material depth in a marble-clad kitchen. A Provençal confit pot holds court in a Maine kitchen. Actress Cobie Smulders uses a terra-cotta enormity to punctuate an oak table that seats 27 guests in her Canadian home. A Hudson Valley farmhouse uses Chinese ceramic as grounding decor.
No homes are so possessed by pottery of this scale as those of Jeremiah Brent and Nate Berkus. Their Portuguese farmhouse, featured on the cover of the June issue of AD, is a case study in the look. Over 3,000 miles from their New York home on Fifth Avenue, the duo turned to the Alentejo region itself for their clay pieces. Aged terra-cotta pots flank the entryway. A towering ribbed ceramic urn in olive beckons in the hallway. An enormous pot in the entry hall was found on the property itself. A glazed piece adorns a rosso antico marble table. A giant terra-cotta amphora lurks behind the dining table. The kitchen dining space is a pottery gold mine — in particular a chalky, weathered vase that commands the entire room, brimming with branches cut from their orchard.
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Two amphoras frame the courtyard in the entryway. A speckled and towering urn was found on the property and placed in the entry hall.
The ubiquity of these towering pieces speaks to a new style of aspirational interior: not one that’s manicured, but intentional with its imperfections and thoughtfully accumulated over time. One retailer who has perfected — if not coined — the look is Nickey Kehoe.
“A found vessel has already lived a life,” Amy Kehoe, cofounder of the brand she started with Todd Nickey, said. “When we’re sourcing, we’re always asking, ‘Does this piece add a layer of meaning, or just fill a shelf?'”
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Kehoe said the irregularity of the piece is essential: off-kilter, patchy glazework, and a very legible human touch that makes a room feel like it evolved rather than was assembled. “That’s the quality we’re always chasing.”
What has changed recently, Nickey said, is that clients are arriving at the same conclusion themselves. “They’re not asking us to convince them anymore.” The pair suggests that our visual culture is so polished and optimized that interiors crave authenticity. “Imperfection has become a form of proof,” Nickey said.
Baylor Pillow, the Mississippi-based designer behind Beep Design Co., has a similar take. “On the whole, I think we are all too used to seeing clean and pristine,” Pillow said. He’s energized by the historical context a client is drawn to. The question isn’t “Do you want old things? It’s which old things, and why?”
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The clay pot trend isn’t just about scale. It’s about a rejection of the frictionless, Instagram-ready aesthetic that has dominated home decor for years. These vessels are heavy, textured, and sometimes uneven. Their appeal lies in what they lack — perfect symmetry, glossy surfaces, and any trace of a factory line. They’re objects that carry visible evidence of the hands that made them.
For designers, the challenge is finding pieces that feel authentic rather than staged. A genuine antique confit pot from Provence carries a different weight than a mass-produced replica from a big-box retailer. The irregular glazing, the chips, the slight tilt — those aren’t flaws to be fixed. They’re the whole point.