Text by Lorna Reeves • Photography Courtesy of The Brooklyn Teacup
Upcycling vintage china for a new generation.
Ariel Davis grew up enjoying tea parties at her grandmother’s house, always feeling rather adultlike and quite fancy as she grasped the delicate cups and saucers with which the table was always prettily set. This New Jersey native would have never imagined then—or even later as a very young adult—that such dainty wares would someday become for her the cornerstone of a creatively rewarding entrepreneurial endeavor.
Although Ariel appreciated fine china as integral to the family traditions of her upbringing, especially for holidays and important occasions, as a career woman with her first apartment (a small one in New York City), she admits to having had no interest in owning anything that required washing by hand or that took up much space. Consequently, she didn’t even put fine china on her bridal registry, much to the dismay of her own mother and her future mother-in-law.
For years, as she would walk or jog through the streets of her New York City borough, Ariel would notice random pieces of china discarded in boxes among the trash. “I always knew on some level that I wasn’t the only person with an affinity for china who valued the memories, traditions, and meaningful associations tied to it but didn’t want to make space for it in their small apartments,” she shares. In 2018 while out on one of her neighborhood strolls, Ariel came across a large set of dishes that had been set out to the curb to be hauled off with the garbage. She just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it there with the other trash, so she took the box home with her where it sat on her table for almost a week before it occurred to her that she could turn it into versatile serving or dis- play pieces similar to the tiered stand on her soon-to-be- married sister’s registry at Bloomingdale’s.
