The Things We Find Along the Way

There is a small bookbindery in Italy making journals we can’t stop touching.

The leather is soft and wonderfully imperfect. Inside, thick pages wait to be filled, bound into books by people who still practice the old craft by hand.

And somehow, that leads us somewhere else.

To an old piece of Himalayan metalwork. Turquoise. A crystal formed deep in the earth. A tiny brass maker’s mark. An artist who looks at all of it and sees something that isn’t there yet.

This is one of our favorite things about Ashgrove.

A search for one beautiful object rarely ends with that object.

It leads to workshops and artists. Natural materials and old traditions. Places we’ve never visited and crafts we didn’t know existed. One maker leads to another. One material sends us chasing its history. And every so often, something completely unexpected lands on the table.

Those are the good days.

Not everything we find becomes part of Ashgrove & Co. Some things simply send us farther down the road.

But the pieces that stay tend to have something we couldn’t manufacture if we tried: the hand of a remarkable maker, an interesting past, the beautiful irregularity of something made by hand, an impossible streak of color running through a natural stone, or a story we can’t wait to pass along.

And that’s how Ashgrove grows.