There was a period, roughly two years ago now, when this whole site was a bit sniffy about terracotta vases. Too rustic, too Pinterest, too many of them turning up empty on shelves doing absolutely nothing except being the shape of a vase. That opinion has properly reversed since, to the point where three of us now own one each and only one of us will admit the first one was bought purely because it looked good in a photo, on a shelf, in a kitchen that was not our kitchen and had significantly better light than ours does.
The thing nobody warns you about is the size trap. In a shop, or worse, on a screen, they all look roughly the same, medium, friendly, unthreatening. Get one home and it either looks like a prop from a film set in the middle of your actual mantelpiece, or it’s so small you keep forgetting it’s there and nearly knock it off with a mug. One of ours measures 34 centimeters tall and photographed like it would fill a corner.
It fills approximately a third of a corner.
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The corner remains, to this day, unfilled and slightly resentful.
The room surprises are the real story though. A vase that looks perfectly at home in a hallway with cold light and bare floors can look completely wrong the second you move it into a room with a rug, warm lamps and actual clutter. Terracotta wants a bit of starkness around it to make sense, apparently, which nobody tells you until you’ve already moved it four times trying to work out why it looks sulky on the bookshelf.
There’s also the business of what goes in it, or doesn’t. Dried stems, sure, that’s the obvious answer, but half the appeal turns out to be leaving it completely empty, which some of us find calming and others find looks like we forgot to finish decorating. That one is unresolved and will likely stay that way.
Would we keep it. Genuinely yes, more than most things we’ve bought on a whim. It survives being knocked, survives being ignored for months, survives a toddler using it as a drum with a wooden spoon, which is more than can be said for most of what’s on that same shelf. The larger one, the 34 centimeter one that overpromised on the corner, has been quietly demoted to the hallway, where it turns out to be exactly the right size after all, which is either a happy accident or proof that we should have measured the actual space before buying it, rather than measuring the version of the room that existed in our heads.
