Clay and glaze treated with the seriousness of a material study. Technique refined enough to let a single surface hold the room.
Ann Sacks has been sourcing and making tile and stone since 1981. It's part of the Kohler family now — the same Kohler that's been casting kitchen and bath fixtures in Wisconsin since 1873, currently on its fourth generation of family leadership. At the heart of it is the Portland, Oregon factory, home to MADE by Ann Sacks, which has been hand-producing guest-designer and in-house collections for more than 35 years. Twenty-two showrooms across North America carry the work, and the identity still comes from that one factory floor.
Wearstler treats the Portland factory as a design partner, with both sides contributing equally. That is how nine collections have stayed fresh. Ann Sacks brings expertise in glaze and clay; Kelly brings pattern that asks the material to do more than expected. Six of those collections came through MADE, where the geometry is planned precisely and finished by hand, so every tile keeps a little variation.
What excites me about handmade production is that it introduces humanity into something highly structured. You get the rigor of geometry, but also the subtle variation and warmth that only comes from the hand. That tension between precision and imperfection is where so much beauty lives.
Treillage
Treillage takes its cue from the garden trellis, a structure that works as both support and ornament. Five tile formats, hand-thrown in Portland, are designed to be read together, so a flat pattern gains depth the instant two scales meet.
Billow
Billow started with a vintage puffy jacket and a question: could ceramic behave like fabric. The answer is a pillowed, fluted tile in reactive MADE glazes that pool thick in the valleys and thin at the peaks, so no two tiles break the same way twice.
Liaison
Liaison has been in the Ann Sacks lineup since 2016. This update pushes its geometry into trompe-l'oeil territory with five new patterns — Haven, Loom, Truss, Tecton, Axis — carved from marble, travertine, limestone, and onyx until flat stone reads as three-dimensional.
