Ceramist Beth Katz and I have been on the phone for nearly an hour when I ask her if she needs a basket intervention. “I will forbid that! I can’t stop, and I don’t want to,” she says with a laugh, acknowledging an obsession that started when she was a teenager. Throughout her hilltop home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, woven delights are neatly stacked on top of one another, hanging languidly in the bathroom, and snuggled up to each other in her on-site studio. The connection from baskets to clay is evident in Katz’s work; she’s the mind (and hands) behind L.A. cult favorite Mt. Washington Pottery, her style often marked by textural, reedlike grooves.
“I didn’t think I could be an artist,” Katz, who spent decades as a makeup artist in publishing and entertainment, recalls. But with many years of training in ceramics (as a teenager, and with Phil Cornelius at Pasadena City College) and a longing for something new at 50, she was looking for a change. “I went to graduate school for spiritual psychology to figure out what I wanted to do next,” she says.
Katz’s workspace is only the newest area of the charming stucco home she’s lived in for 30 years. “It looks like a beach cottage stuck up in a tree,” she muses. The circa-1920s structure was originally devised as a two-room hunting cabin, and it has weathered some funky additions throughout the years. Over the course of three decades, Katz has undone the more unfortunate changes and remade the space into a serene retreat—one that looks out onto a property lush with wild grasses, lemon and orange trees, and an old-growth pepper tree.
Inside, the main living room’s exposed beam ceiling, as well as built-in bookshelves and cabinets, are painted in Benjamin Moore White; the combination creates an airy entry anchored by vintage wood furnishings and a wall of casement windows. Set within the shelving are ceramic pieces by such artists as Natan Moss and Ako Castuera; a stack of Kinfolk issues; and books like Beyond Craft, Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, and How to Wrap Five Eggs. “There were no closets in the house except in the bedroom,” she says. “I had to whittle out storage wherever I could.” She also had to carve out a more petite entry point for her dog at the time. While it has passed on, her rescue pup, Petal, enjoys the miniature-size portal, and for Katz, it’s an informal marker of memory. “Last time I had the house painted, I asked them not to paint the dog door,” she recalls. “It’s like my version of the measuring stick for kids.”
A pass-through window peeks into the kitchen, where Katz installed shelving to hold just a sliver of her pottery collection, which includes her own creations, donabes from Toiro Kitchen, Korean ceramics, and pieces by Byron Temple, one of her favorite artists. A Wedgewood stove is nestled just so under the opening, allowing Katz to chat with guests or keep an eye on Petal while she cooks.
The rest of the small yet open floor plan (it’s just 900 square feet) unfurls a series of intimate rooms where more books, artwork, and patterned textiles mingle with one another in close quarters. In some areas, like the guest room and reading nook, furniture touches both walls. But for how tiny the place is, “it sleeps an incredible amount of people,” the artist says. “There are lots of cozy little spaces.” Katz covered the back deck with a proper roof and wrapped it in walls of windows so she can use it year-round. It’s now a place for meals and where she builds her ceramic bells and other pieces that require construction.
In the bathroom, a tinted plaster floor extends into the shower, where the material creeps up the walls to create a bench under two expansive windows. Waterworks fixtures add to the earthy space, which looks out onto the grounds.
Katz’s home studio, which occupies a lower level under the dining room, finally took shape during the pandemic after years (and years) of dreaming of the addition. “I put a pipe sticking out of the back of the house where I always thought the ceramic sink would go,” she remembers, adding that she had also acquired a permit to enclose the downstairs space around the same time but didn’t have the finances to move forward yet.
It was a prescient idea for a couple reasons. In 2021, Katz began feeling strange one morning while in her Monrovia studio. “By the time I got to the hospital, which was 4 in the afternoon, I couldn’t walk anymore,” she explains. “I had no feeling from my hips down.” She was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that, thankfully, has stabilized. But what has stuck around is the need to slow down, which ultimately spurred her to finally establish the space. Meanwhile, Mount Washington is a notoriously difficult neighborhood in which to obtain permits. Seeing that she had already taken care of that, plus the fact that her neighbor was a master builder and contractor, made the addition more seamless. She tapped him to help her create the space, including a den and a bathroom complete with a claw-foot tub.
Most days, she’s up early and heads downstairs with coffee around 6 a.m. “I think that my brain is the best early in the morning,” Katz says. Among the ample natural light and floor-to-ceiling shelves of inventory—lamps, mugs, bells, planters, vessels of all sizes—she’ll throw or alter a piece already in the works; sometimes it’s just paperwork. Then she’ll take a walk with Petal before the rest of the day kicks in.
“One of the things that people always say when they come here is that it’s calming,” Katz remarks. “To operate in this crazy world, I need a place that feels like that. The way that I’ve made the house look is not necessarily aesthetic. It’s for feeling.”
