Divine Dining

Beato Home features five pieces in a textured neutral white, meticulously crafted by Creative Fire Studio in Granada Hills.

For many Ojai residents, the parlor game of assembling a fantasy dinner party would likely include the irrepressible local ceramicist Beatrice Wood, who passed away in 1998 at the age of 105. Now fans of the iconoclastic multidisciplinary artist, known affectionately as “Beato,” can enjoy an homage to her legacy on their own dinner tables with BEATO HOME. “People just went crazy for it,” recalls Heather Stobo about the original dinnerware set crafted by Wood during the 1960s. The pieces were included in an exhibition she and Lisa Casoni curated at the Porch Gallery, the couple’s art-focused Ojai gathering place, which they closed last year. Finding a way to make Wood’s functional tabletop pieces more accessible to a contemporary audience was a logical next step, especially given their partnership with the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts through Beato Chocolates, the artisanal candy line Casoni and Stobo launched in 2018. Beato Home features five pieces in a textured neutral white, meticulously crafted by Creative Fire Studio in Granada Hills. The collection, which is faithful to Wood’s original clay type, colors, and glazes, is available online and at select retailers, including Field + Fort in Summerland. Beato Home is an impassioned tribute to a one-of-a-kind spirit whose “greatest work of art was her life,” Casoni says. “She’s our North Star in the chocolate business and this dinnerware business.”  beatohome.com