One-of-a-Kind Holiday Gifts from Dumais Made
By Zachary Schwartz
Photos by Ryan Lavine
It all started while on a dreamy summer holiday in Puglia, Italy. Husbands and business partners Charlie and Kevin Dumais were touring pottery studios when they unexpectedly recognized the Arethusa logo. It turned out that this particular ceramicist designed the dishes displayed throughout Bantam’s Arethusa al Tavolo. This serendipitous encounter evolved into the inspiration for Dumais Made’s 2023 holiday collection.
Charlie and Kevin Dumais are the Litchfield-based founders of Dumais Made and Dumais Interior Design. Dumais Made is their ceramics studio, specializing in made-to-order lights and accessories crafted from rolled clay slabs dipped in earth-toned glazes. Dumais Interior Design is their interior design firm, specializing in residential interiors with an unpretentious and mid-century aesthetic.
“Our sensibility to design and the way we think about furnishing a home is that it has to be very practical and sensible, but also beautiful and refined. Our interiors feel very tactile and approachable,” says Kevin Dumais. Together, Charlie and Kevin are building a creative collective within the Bantam Arts Factory that offers expertly designed interiors with in situ pottery.
Their stunning Bantam studio is where they roll, mold, fire, and glaze their one-of-a-kind pottery. “Aesthetically, a lot of our forms and shapes are driven by architecture that I love, like Bauhaus and Brutalist, with the scale of mid-century,” explains Charlie Dumais. “We really want them to be tactile, and you can see the construction. A signature of our pieces is that we expose the seams.”
For their 2023 limited edition holiday collection, Dumais Made introduced pottery inspired by their trip to Puglia. Pomegranates are a popular motif in southern Italy that symbolize gratitude and bounty, so they created clay pomegranates. “The overall aesthetic for this holiday series is structures we saw while in Puglia, like smoke stacks or textures of stonework. We wanted them to feel cohesive, and we have never done something whimsical like the pomegranate before,” says Charlie Dumais.
Other specialty pieces in the collection include trays, candlesticks, lamps, and champagne buckets. They all exhibit signature codes of the design studio, like textured grooves embossed by antique rolling pins and fabric-like qualities from the canvas that the clay is rolled in. Most of the objects are finished in a soothing neutral shade of gray called parchment.
While these ceramic accessories complement any holiday tablescape, they also make for splendid gifts to be used beyond just the holidays. “I always hope that whatever we make makes somebody smile. That’s why both of us do what we do. I hope this collection makes someone feel special,” says Charlie Dumais.
For the holidays this year, Charlie and Kevin Dumais will decorate their own Litchfield home with festive decor of DIY pine cone garlands, fresh greenery, and Ukrainian glass ornaments on their Christmas tree. Their ceramic pomegranates on the holiday dinner table are certain to be a harbinger of gratitude, benisons, and bounty in the coming new year.
