Michael Chandler

Michael Chandler
Cape Town, South Africa

Michael Chandler has been curious his whole life. By the age of ten he was breeding tropical fish, gardening, doing needlework and drawing — already finding that through simple gestures and consistent work, the everyday could be made extraordinary. He is entirely self-taught and describes himself as an artist, curator, illustrator and ceramicist who intends to keep learning.

In 2010 he founded Chandler House in Cape Town — not simply a shop, but a home as much as a house. It is his studio, a boutique stocked with homeware, a gallery for other artists and designers and a permanent experiment in objets, antiques, art and whimsy. His own work has shown at the National Gallery in South Africa and the Grand Palais in Paris, and appeared on building-sized murals from Miami to Morocco. His hand-painted, individually commissioned platterware sits on tables from Norway to Singapore, and his collaborations range from Standard Bank to the Dubai chocolate house Mirzam.

The signature that runs through the ceramics is a hand-painted blue-and-white style rooted in Cape Town's particular place in trade history — the point where Chinese export porcelain and European tableware once met and became something new. Chandler takes that history and plays with it: cobalt blue on porcelain, intricate and etching-like, entirely his own hand.

We carry Michael Chandler because his work turns a complicated trade history into something with wit and curiosity rather than mere decoration and never loses the visual pleasure that makes you want it on a wall in the first place.

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