Torimoto

Yusuke and Yuya Torimoto are a husband-and-wife team based in Kyotamba who trained for about a decade before opening their own workshop in 2015. Every piece is hand-blown from a batch they formulate themselves from more than ten raw materials — silica sand, lime, and soda ash among them — balanced by hand and stripped of iron impurities for clarity, then gathered molten from a crucible held above 1,300°C, shaped on the blowpipe, reheated to its final form, and cooled for hours in an annealing oven so it won't crack under its own tension. Each piece is built around use rather than display: weight is considered both empty and filled with liquid, and pieces within the same design are intentionally made in slightly varied sizes so each person can find the one that fits their hand, with many pieces named after water — ripples, foam, dripping — a recurring motif drawn from the river near their studio.