JP Carafe

The JP Carafe, made of Bohemian crystal, is an object of minimal beauty. The Carafe has all the prop­er­ties of tradi­tional crystal, being clear and quite heavy, yet absent of any orna­men­ta­tion. Even the propor­tions within the unique shape of the JP carafe are perfect, a testa­ment to Pawson’s exper­tise in minimalism.

The origins of the John Pawson’s collec­tion of objects lie in a new Cister­ian monastery in Bohemia, also designed by Pawson. From the idea of creat­ing a set of essen­tial equip­ment for the monks’ refec­tory has, in turn, evolved into a collec­tion which repre­sents an elegant minimum for the contem­po­rary table. The forms are simple but power­ful, refined but sensu­ously lyrical, uniting rigor­ous atten­tion to details of scale, propor­tion, and fabrication.

Pawson was born and brought up in Halifax, York­shire, the youngest of five chil­dren. Coming from a wealthy family, he was schooled at Eton. After a period in the family textile busi­ness, Pawson left for Japan in his mid-twen­ties, moving to Tokyo during the final year of his stay, where he visited the studio of Japan­ese archi­tect and designer Shiro Kura­mata. On his return to England, he enrolled at the Archi­tec­ture Asso­ci­a­tion in London, leaving to estab­lish his prac­tice in 1981.