Ceramists tend to have an easygoing embrace of fate. Misfirings happen in the kiln, and happy accidents do too. Last year, as the New York City–based designer Danny Kaplan began canvassing for a larger Brooklyn workshop—a search complicated by steep rents and necessary buildouts—his longtime production manager, Val Shamma, shared that he and his wife were moving to North Adams, Massachusetts. It occurred to them that maybe the solution was actually to follow him.
Kaplan, best known for his sculptural lighting and furniture, found himself contemplating a major geographic shift. The Berkshires city, like so many once-bustling mill towns, had experienced a downturn in the mid-20th century before art institutions like MASS MoCA helped put it on the cultural map. Former industrial spaces beckoned to creative professionals looking for room to grow without the crippling overhead of New York City’s primary boroughs. Once the pieces started to fall into place, it made perfect sense, he says, eventually landing on a roomy, ground-floor warehouse situated inside a converted textile mill.
Now, with its electrical system updated to support three energy-intensive kilns and a glass garage door added to flood the interior with natural light, this expansive facility is where Kaplan does much of his ceramic casting and larger sculptural work. Meanwhile, his original Bushwick workshop continues to operate, focusing on production tasks like lamps and other hand-built pieces.
This past summer in the Berkshires, the studio was busy churning out slim, colorful tiles for his Delf collection—a collaboration with Vince Patti’s furniture firm Lesser Miracle. Derived from the Dutch word for canal or ditch, delf refers to the grooved wood designed specifically to hold the tile securely in place. The pair have been working together since 2024, when they initially teamed up on a custom bed for Kaplan featuring a wraparound headboard and a striking border of inset ceramic tiles.
This fall, the collaboration expands further with Delf II, which extends that established design language to a console, a coffee table, a desk, and a nightstand. Each of these new pieces is crafted in oiled oak with sophisticated octagonal tops. The intricate ceramic components, which are produced in a wide range of custom glazes at Kaplan’s new North Adams facility, travel south to Lesser Miracle’s woodshop in Brooklyn, where Patti oversees the final assembly and integration into the wooden furniture frames.
While this new workspace has significantly increased Kaplan’s daily production capability and operational efficiency, he is ultimately more interested in the broader opportunities it poses for expansive thinking and creative exploration. In time, he envisions hosting visiting artists who find themselves in need of a refreshing scene change, all while knitting himself into the fabric of the North Adams community. It’s very serene, he notes, adding that ceramic people naturally love community and collaborative environments.