About Ferzalon
Every plate is painted by a person, so no two are the same
Ferzalon makes hand-painted earthenware for the table — dinner plates, supper bowls and serving platters, decorated with the things that actually get eaten. Lobster, crab, langoustine, sardines, tomatoes. Painted freehand, under the glaze, then fired.
Why the brushwork shows
We could print these. Printing is cheaper, faster, and identical every time, which is exactly the problem. A printed lobster has a hard mechanical edge and a flat body, and once you have seen one you have seen the whole run.
A painted lobster is laid on with a loaded brush. The coral goes on thick where the brush lands and thins where it lifts. The outline wobbles. The claws are never quite symmetrical. That is what makes a plate worth looking down at while you eat off it, and it is why we accept the slower, more expensive way of doing it.
What we make
Dinner plates, 26 cm
Full-size plates, not display pieces. One animal or one truss of tomatoes in the well, and a rim of hand-painted dashes. Two of them carry words instead.
Supper bowls, 18 cm
Deep enough for soup or a proper bowl of pasta, roughly 600 ml. Painted on the inside, so you only get the whole animal once the bowl is empty.
Serving platters, 38 cm
Oval, gently scalloped, painted right across the well. Holds a whole roast fish or the antipasti for six, and looks like something when it is empty.
How it is made
Each piece is thrown or pressed in earthenware with a warm ivory body, then painted by hand with ceramic colour. The decoration goes on under the glaze — not on top of it — and the glaze is fired over the painting. That is the whole reason these survive a dishwasher: there is no film sitting on the surface, so there is no edge for hot water and detergent to lift.
The consequence is that the colour palette is limited. Ceramic colours that survive a glaze firing are a shorter list than the ones in a printer. We work in cobalt, delft, coral, tomato red, olive, saffron and a silver-grey, and that is most of it. Everything in the range is built from those.
What varies, and what does not
Varies: where the animal sits in the well, the width of the rim strokes, how many dashes go round the edge, the exact depth of the coral. On the langoustine plate, even the number of langoustines. None of that is a fault — it is the difference between a hand and a machine, and it is the thing you are buying.
Does not vary: the dimensions, the glaze, the dishwasher and microwave suitability, and the fact that every piece is checked before it is packed. Ceramics and anything fragile go double-boxed with moulded inserts, not loose fill.
Who you are buying from
Ferzalon is a trading name of ULIKE E-COMMERCE CO., LIMITED (優來電子商務有限公司), a company registered in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, at Unit 903, 9/F, Cameron Commercial Centre, 458–468 Hennessy Road, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.
We ship to the United States free of charge and to the rest of the world at a flat rate. Customer questions are handled by email at info@ferzalon.com, and a person — not an auto-responder — answers within one business day.