Happiness in a Bottle

Living in London, the visual experience can sometimes be a bit limited, and limiting. Luckily, I have access to a roof terrace with a gorgeous view, which made me think about how much fun owning a telescope would be.

A simple concept: looking through a hole and seeing a very detailed snippet of a scene far away. But what if instead of just zooming into a scene, I could look through a hole and see something magical? Instead of a closer look at the same old construction sites and crumbling brick, what if I could access an alternate world? Not a portal, but a keyhole to a different place I can peek through - wouldn’t this be amazing?

So I made it.

It started with a doodle in my phone’s notes, where so many “good idea”s and “I should try this one day...”s go to die.

But I allowed this little dream to live a bit longer when I made a clay prototype. Nothing complicated, just a flat bottom with a little cube on it, covered by a dome which I poked two rough holes into; one to peek inside, one to let light in.

Failure.

The “house in a bottle” did not have the softly lit ethereal elegance I had in mind. It was a deformed vase with a secret nobody would ever care to uncover hidden inside. But this showed me that, while the light might need adjusting, I almost had the skills to almost form a bottle. So I carried on. New materials for translucence, new files for smoothness, new scissors of all sizes for sizing, shaping, correcting and texturing, more time, more patience, more coffee - and soon my second prototype was ready to reveal it’s hidden insides.

Success!

This time, what I had planned to be an unassuming, plain white bottle one might display a flower in revealed a scene of two small houses when looked into and held against a light. The concept worked: a minimalist bottle that can be used as a vase or a decorative accent that nobody would take much note of. But looking inside would reveal such wonders. And with this, I began to fiddle, improve, iterate, prototype and produce.

My second prototype popped out of the oven on May 2nd of 2021. Just over a month later, I have sold 8 bottles with hidden scenes inside and another 16 custom orders are waiting to be brought to life.

So now I build worlds in bottles. For hours on end, I sit down, listen to a podcast or Italian 80’s, drink way too much coffee and spend hours carving out detailed houses smaller than a fingerprint, and greenery, appliances, beasts and spirits even smaller. I’m in awe of what I am able to create with a bit of clay, precise scissors and some imagination. I’ve built houses with gardens next to ponds, smoke from the chimney acting as an invitation to come in for a cup of coffee; I created woodlands where fairies meet in secret when - almost - nobody is watching; I have given characters from my childhood new homes in their own worlds; I have given tiny clay koi carp a home in a calm stream runing through a Japanese garden underneath a wisteria; and much more.

What never fails to amaze me - without trying to brag - is how I keep receiving order requests for things I know I cannot make, and how I then make them. A couple hours after I wanted to tell a customer that I can’t make a dragon, I made a dragon. A gorgeous one, at that, marbled with gold, with twisted horns, scales shaped with a needle, spines formed with nothing but a pair of scissors, the eyes two dots of gold. And it worked. I couldn’t make a frog until I sat down and did it anyway. I knew I couldn’t possibly build the house from my favourite childhood show, the Moomins, without doing it a disservice, until I spent 5 hours shaping, baking, carving and re-shaping a gorgeous thumb sized replica of it. Now whenever I am tired of the city, I take a deep breath, pick up my bottle, look inside and just like that, I am in Moominvalley.