Grandmont Street

“Five years ago, I got a divorce, and I ended up in a little community ceramics class — you know, the sort of things where it’s, like,  ‘Everybody gather round, let’s make a casserole!’” says Julia Finlayson, sharing the origin story behind Grandmont Street, her ceramics collection. “It stuck with me, and I just kept making the sort of things I wanted to own myself.” Those pieces included match strikes, vases, and oddball vessels tailor-designed to accommodate small blooms — the studio detritus she collected while working at a local floral studio. Set on this new path, she hustled. “I was just sort of a traveling vacuum salesman, like, ‘Hey, here's these things that I make,’ and it sort of went from there,” she says. Now, her pieces walk that fine line between formal austerity and a human warmth: “I don't like stuff that's stark — the sort of piece you got at the MoMA gift shop,” she says. “Simple, modern, warm — that’s where I want to be.”