25 Years of Ceramic Practice: The Story Behind Doppiocotto

Every piece in the Doppiocotto shop is made by one person, in one studio, using one technique. That sounds like a limitation. In practice, it is the whole point.

Bora Cetin has been working with clay for 25 years. Not as a side project, and not as a recent pivot into "artisan" branding — 25 years of daily practice, refining a hand-building technique that most ceramic studios do not use at all.

No Wheel, No Mould

The most common question people ask when they see the Doppiocotto process for the first time is: "where's the wheel?" There isn't one. Every cup, mug, plate and vase is slab-built — stoneware clay rolled into sheets, cut into precise component forms using templates, and joined by hand. It is slower than throwing on a wheel, and it produces a different kind of object: walls that are even rather than tapered, edges that carry the evidence of hand-cutting, a geometry that a moulded or thrown piece simply cannot replicate.

This is not a stylistic choice made for marketing purposes. It's the technique Bora has developed and refined over two and a half decades, and it shapes everything about how a Doppiocotto piece looks, feels, and holds up over years of daily use.

Twice Fired, By Design

The name "Doppiocotto" is Italian for "double fired" — a direct reference to the two-stage firing process behind every piece. A bisque firing at around 1000°C removes moisture and stabilises the clay. A second glaze firing, to 1220–1280°C, fuses the glaze to the stoneware body and gives the finished piece its density and durability. It's also a quiet nod to the studio's origins: the first Doppiocotto collection was a set of handmade espresso cups, and coffee ceramics remain at the centre of what the studio makes.

One Studio, Two Purposes

The Waterloo studio, a two-minute walk from Waterloo station, is not a showroom. It's a working ceramics space — slab roller, kiln, drying racks, glazing equipment, all in daily use producing the pieces sold in the shop. It's also where pottery workshops run several times a week, taught personally by Bora. Participants work with the same clay, the same tools, and the same techniques used to make everything in the collection. There's no separation between the production studio and the teaching space, because they're the same room.

Why 25 Years Matters

Handmade ceramics are easy to describe and hard to actually do well, consistently, at scale. A quarter-century of daily practice is what makes it possible to produce pieces in small batches without the quality varying wildly from one to the next — and to teach complete beginners the same technique in a two-hour workshop session. Experience doesn't just show up in the finished object. It shows up in how a class is taught, how a glaze is mixed, and how a studio runs.

You can read more about the studio and the process on the About page, browse the full collection, or book a class to see the technique in person.