A Little More Light by the Front Door
The days are getting shorter fast enough now that I'm home from errands after dark more often than not, and I've started paying more attention to what greets me at the door. It takes very little, as it turns out — one lamp that isn't the overhead, and one small handmade thing hanging at the height your hand already passes.
I've hung a small stoneware bat from a bit of jute on our porch knob — early, on purpose. These are made to order, so if I want one up before October rather than halfway through it, late summer is when it has to go in. It's a nod to the season, quiet enough that it still feels like our house and not a display, and it's already become one of my favorite details of the week: arriving home in the dark to something a little playful waiting there.
The thing I keep relearning about entryways is that height decides everything. Anything hung above a door is scenery — you notice it once and then your eye files it away for good. Anything at the height of your hand, on the knob, on the handle, on the hook where the keys land, becomes part of arriving, because you actually touch it on the way past. That's the whole rule, and it costs nothing: decorate a doorway at hand height, not eye height.
As the season turns colder and darker (and a little more mischievous), I think the entryway deserves this kind of small, handmade attention — it's the first and last thing you experience in your own home, every single day.
A little playful, waiting there in the dark.
They come in three sizes — five inches across, six, and seven — strung on natural jute, so a set of three reads as a small colony rather than a single ornament. Flat shapes like these are the fussiest thing in my studio to dry: a slab loses water fastest at its edges and will curl like a dry leaf if you let it hurry, so each one dries slowly, flat and covered, for days before it ever sees the kiln. And they're happiest indoors or on a covered porch — it isn't the cold that damages ceramic left outside, it's water sitting in it and then freezing.
See the handmade stoneware bats if your own entryway could use a little seasonal charm — a small autumn run, made to order in the studio.
Handmade to order in my Cary, NC studio — please allow 2–3 weeks, which is why I'm mentioning them now rather than in October.
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A few things mentioned: the handmade stoneware bats, in small, medium and large.
What I like best about it isn't really the bat. It's that for a few weeks of the year there's a reason to look at the door before I open it — and once you've looked at your own door on purpose, it's surprisingly hard to go back to walking straight through it.
What's the small thing that makes your own entryway feel like home when you walk in? I'd love to know.