About Us

Hi, we’re Eric and Barbara Havill, husband and wife potters.

Since 1972, we’ve been making functional pottery at our farm studio, located on a wooded hillside overlooking Keuka Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Each of our pieces is hand-formed and individually decorated with birds, blossoms or other themes inspired by our natural surroundings. Our own horses and cats also sometimes find their way onto our pots! We’ve developed several motifs unique to the Finger Lakes. incuding grapes with leaves and our signature “QKA View” landscape featuring a sailboat in the foreground and the Bluff in the background.

We work with porcelain, a white clay, and brown-speckled stoneware. We finish our pots with glazes that we make ourselves, in colors ranging from matt white, shiny burgundy red, mossy green, chocolate brown, and golden pumpkin. We’re constantly experimenting with new glazes. Two recent winners include a greenish turquoise we’re calling “sea foam,” and a bluish purple we’ve named “blue horizon.”

Each of us works on the potter’s wheel. Eric makes the larger pieces such as table lamps and lidded casseroles, as well as a variety of hand-built shapes, including a wide range of open baking dishes in rectangular and oval shapes. Barb makes the smaller pieces, among them dinner and dessert plates, mugs, bowls, and jardinieres. She decorates each piece by hand, using techniques derived from Japanese sumi-e brushwork, while Eric does the glazing and firing in a big gas kiln we designed and built ourselves.