If you’re planning to jazz up your coffee break, you could do worse than serve your finest single-origin blends in O.W. London’s colourful bone china cups.
Stocked in Pipa in Little Venice and WCD in Highgate, the cups were designed by Hampstead-based Olivia Weinberg in response to the dominance of pretty pretty designs in the market.
“I decided to make these cups and mugs because I couldn’t find the sort of things I was looking for,” she says. “A lot of tea ware out there is quite feminine and floral and I wanted something more striking and colourful.”
Drawing inspiration from art history – Weinberg is also an art critic – the bold colours and graphic black lines of her first range are influenced by 1960s Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein.
Although not professionally trained, Weinberg created all the designs herself the old-fashioned way with paper, pencils and paint.
“Because I’d hand drawn and hand painted all my designs I worked with an art worker who helped translate the designs on to the computer so they could be made up in the factory,” she says.
“I also worked with a colourist, which was quite a long process with a lot of trial and error because the colours looks very different before the bone china gets glazed.”
The designs were then manufactured at a family run factory in Stoke on Trent, making them 100 per cent British-made, something of a rarity in an age of Far Eastern mass production.
Why not buy the full set and mix and match colours for a playful yet elegant elevenses?
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