I grew up in South Devon before moving to London to study at Chelsea College, University of the Arts London. After setting up my antique shop Phoenix on Golborne Road in 2010, I swiftly gained an obsession for 18th and 19th-century porcelain.
My decade in antiques shaped everything that followed. I spent countless hours studying English coffee cans from the early 1800s with their pleasingly straight sides, French services with loop handles that felt exactly right in the hand, Belgian bowls with perfect proportions.
Exquisitely beautiful pieces, the perfect porcelain white but never quite the right shape or size for my cup of tea or long morning coffee - and rarely more than one of them.
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What began as a hobby naturally developed into a quest to capture this magic. Ten years ago, I began translating these discoveries into contemporary porcelain. Not copying historical pieces, but understanding why certain shapes endure. Why some handles feel natural while others don't. Why the best collections look unified yet alive.
I learned to make everything - including the moulds - myself, allowing me to fine-tune each element intuitively through careful trial and refinement. Creating molds that would achieve the precise proportions I wanted while preserving the balance between consistency and the subtle variations that give pieces their personality.
We've since moved from London to my husband's native Burgundy with our two young children, renovating a crumbling 18th-century house. My atelier sits among the famous vines of the Côte d'Or, where I work exclusively with hard-paste French porcelain. Each piece is slip-cast using methods largely unchanged since the 1700s, but brought back to studio scale. Manual, unhurried, with attention to every detail.
Jess Gildersleve
Those antique slip-cast pieces possessed something modern production had lost - subtle variations that made collections feel alive. Small differences in how handles were placed, the softness that comes when human hands shape each piece. My house was full to the brim of antique treasures, but I struggled to find the right mugs and cups to live harmoniously alongside them.