Faye Toogood comes up roses at Milan Design Week 2025

Faye Toogood is surrounded by a cacophony of roses. These are not the dozens of varieties of roses that she grows in her much-loved garden in the English countryside. Instead, the roses around her inhabit a different cosmos: they are swirling and dynamic, abstract and dripping, vividly layered in visceral pinks and infused with a wild-edged freedom – and she is spontaneously hand-painting them, one by one, on to porcelain in a ceramics studio in Nagoya, central Japan.

Toogood is among a handful of creatives, alongside Ed Ng of AB Concept, Marc Newson, Yabu Pushelberg and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, who are reimagining the heritage-steeped world of Noritake, one of Japan’s first modern ceramic tableware makers.

Noritake is something of a household name in Japan. Since launching in 1904 and unveiling the country’s first Western-style dinner service a decade later, it has become synonymous with the quality of its decorative white porcelain and bone china tableware. Today, however, the vast majority of its output has diversified into ceramics-related industrial technology, from sake to dentistry.

Noritake’s creative director Yuichiro Hori, the entrepreneurial Nagoya-born founder of Stellar Works furniture, is intent on shifting the world’s creative gaze back to its tableware – as reflected in the Noritake Design Collection.

This new series will cast the brand’s richly layered heritage of technology and craftsmanship in a sharp new light at Milan Design Week 2025, with a show at Alcova’s Villa Borsani in a space that has been art directed by Toogood. ‘Timeless and handcrafted are key words,’ says Hori. ‘Many processes are more than 100 years old. These designers are from different continents, but they all respect Noritake’s DNA.’

Highlighting Noritake’s qualities of ‘whiteness, uniformity and sharpness’, Tomoyuki Katada, head of tableware, adds, ‘By combining the technology we have developed with the sensibilities of world-renowned designers, we hope to create something new and valuable.’

The Noritake Design Collection includes Ed Ng’s round and stackable ‘Bangle’ series, in shades of white and blue; Yabu Pushelberg’s ‘Hoshikage’, a 19-piece set with intricately iridescent surface patterns, first showcased in New York last autumn; and a reinterpretation of Marc Newson’s clean-lined tableware originally made for Quantas.

There is also the ‘Peacock’ tableware collection, created with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and inspired by the architect’s peacock motifs for the interior of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. And, of course, Toogood’s ‘Rose’.

Her limited-edition series includes 14 hand-painted pieces in five different shapes, from decadent dinner platters to elegantly tapered pitchers, plus a limited run of 111 platters, with both decal and hand-painted rose motifs.

Playful, energetic and joyful, Toogood’s pieces feature strong brushstrokes of swirling pinks, from cloudy shades to deeper tones, and layered, coiled, forest green foliage, with a hint of postmodern fairytale. Balancing contemporary abstraction with heritage form, each piece was created using original shapes from century-old Noritake moulds.

Mid-process in Noritake’s historic HQ in Nagoya, Toogood sits surrounded by bright palettes of blended pigment paints. Pausing to explain her journey along the path of roses, she says, ‘When Noritake first got in touch, I looked through their museum book and I remember thinking that everything looked like it should be in the V&A. It was all so fine and beautiful and precise.

‘I wasn’t sure how my sculptural geometry or mark-making would fit into this world. But I wanted to find something that was a Venn diagram between Toogood and Noritake. So I asked if they had any original moulds and suggested I come and paint – which now feels ridiculous in a way because they’re master painters and I’m not a painter. But I wanted to get as close as possible to the way they do things here.’

All things roses quickly shifted into focus, the idea blossoming naturally from Toogood’s love of gardening. ‘Most people wouldn’t have me down as someone who clips roses at the weekend,’ she says. ‘But my garden is a big passion and I’m obsessed with rose varieties. I probably have more than 30 types. My mother is a florist and was always arranging roses. And my daughter’s name is Rose.

‘It was only when I went to Noritake’s museum that I realised how much of what they made a century earlier was connected to roses. I hadn’t consciously noted this before. Everything suddenly made sense.’

For Toogood – whose softly sculptural multidisciplinary work is typically shaped by intuitive ideas and creative self-expression – the notion of unwrapping the power and beauty (and stereotypes) of a rose felt perfectly at home.

‘There are obvious connections to the English rose,’ she says. ‘But the rose is powerful. It’s love. It’s kind of sexual. It’s passionate. It’s the fairytale, pricking fingers. There is a darkness. The connection with blood, too, although there are no thorns. It could be considered feminine in a refined, delicate way, but the way I paint them is full of energy and power.’

When it came to actually painting, there was a clear process of ‘unlearning’ on both sides. Drips, splashes and spontaneity are not words commonly featured in the vocabulary of master painter Masami Okada, who has worked at Noritake for more than 35 years.

‘It normally takes about five years to learn how to draw a gold line – and ten years to paint images. We only had three days with Faye,’ he says. ‘I was very worried at first about how to teach her. But then I saw her draw from her imagination – it was so spontaneous. I’m a craftsman – I’m very careful and precise, typically drawing to make a product to sell. But Faye has a boldness. I learnt that this is the difference, this is art.’

‘The golden rules were the ones I broke, such as not using too much oil and solvent with the pigment paint, otherwise it goes everywhere,’ says Toogood. ‘This is the antithesis of what they do – it’s got smudges, running drips, mixes of glazes. Like a badly behaved child, the things he taught me I was able to reverse in order to find my own language. But the outcome has benefited so much from his precision, sense of process and deliberation over the details.’

Drying nearby is the reimagined form of a square-based water pitcher, its surface a deep tangle of coiled greens (‘This one is waiting for the roses,’ says Toogood) and a large round platter, at its heart a single rose, swirling in cosmic chaos and abstraction (‘expressive, experimental, emotional’, she adds).

For Noritake, this is just the beginning. Further projects with contemporary designers are underway, including a tableware collection by Toogood, with new shapes and decorations rooted in heritage. As Toogood says, ‘Noritake hasn’t lost its connection
with history, unlike many British ceramic companies that seem very trends-based. There is a classicism and longevity here. You feel like you’re contributing to an archive.’  

The Noritake Design Collection is on show from 7-13 April during Milan Design Week at Alcova, Villa Borsani, noritakechina.com, t-o-o-g-o-o-d.com, alcova.xyz

This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 3 April 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today