Feats of Clay

Artists Luis and Alejandra Magaña knew their cult-hit ceramics studio had outgrown its compact 1,000-square-foot space on Power Inn Road last year when the line to get into their pre-Christmas sale extended into the parking lot. “I said to my husband, ‘Just keep packing, keep charging—don’t look up,’ ” recalls Alejandra, miming the act of frantically swiping a credit card.

The couple wanted something closer to midtown, the better to host this expanding cadre of customers who often seek them out after admiring their dinner-ware on the tables of A-list culinary establishments throughout the region. And by March, they are standing amid the moving boxes in an airy, high-ceilinged space at North 16th and North C streets, which is twice the size of their former studio, giving them the room they need to ramp up production and hire three or four employees this year to meet the growing demand for their restaurant ware. Their latest retail offering is the stylish Pedregal Bowl, designed for the much-anticipated Pedregal Cantina in Folsom, a collaboration between the restaurateurs behind the Michelin-recognized Canon and Nixtaco, which is set to open in May. The new Echeri Ceramics occupies a suite inside a block-long U-shaped building that used to house a bustling commercial fruit and vegetable market, with a roll-up door to facilitate airflow when the kilns are burning.

The Magañas’ complementary skill sets and their love of experimentation and learning by doing recall another powerhouse design couple with a Sacramento connection: renowned mid-century designers Charles and Ray Eames (Ray was born and raised here), who also worked frequently in clay.

“There’s a sense of pride that Sacramento has so much history in clay,” says Alejandra, citing the Eameses, UC Davis sculptor Robert Arneson (best known for his massive Egghead sculptures around campus), and the Crocker Museum’s extensive ceramics collection. “We want to design something where you can look at it and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s from Sacramento.’ ”

Echeri’s husband-and-wife team of Luis and Alejandra Magaña at their new Sacramento studio in March.

Alejandra, 34, was born and raised in Stockton, while Luis, 37, was born in Mexico but grew up mostly in the Central Valley. They met as art students at Sacramento State. After graduating, she landed a job as a ceramics teacher at Bear Creek High School in Stockton—even though she had never particularly enjoyed ceramics in art school, it grew into a hobby—while he worked as an art handler in the curatorial department at the Crocker, developing his appreciation for ceramics.

In 2013, they launched a venture called Manjar Ceramics as a side hustle, soon specializing in adorably rustic mugs with hand-painted faces which they called muñecas (“dolls” in Spanish) and selling them wholesale and retail around the country. By 2017, it had become a full-time business, and two years later they renamed it Echeri (pronounced etch-AIRY)—which translates to “dirt” or “earth” in the Purépecha language spoken by the Indigenous people of Michoacán, Mexico, where the couple both have roots.

But churning out the popular muñecas—Luis threw every mug, while Alejandra painted each unique face—the couple began to feel like actors in a long-running sitcom at risk of being forever typecast. It was time for a pivot. The opportunity came when design firm Colossus Mfg. tapped them to create bud vases for the tabletops at the East Sacramento restaurant Canon during a patio redesign in 2019.

READ MORE: Double Vision – Inside the story-driven work of Colossus Mfg.

Canon co-owner Clay Nutting recognized something in the couple’s work right away. “I noticed these little ceramic vases on our tables, and they immediately exuded a vibrance and a soul just looking at them,” he says. “It’s so fascinating when you are near something that is artisanally made. It just has an aura about it.”

Nutting was compelled to pay a visit to the workshop to meet the couple behind the vases, and a flourishing partnership was born. Echeri has since crafted servingware for Canon’s family-style dishes, and in 2021, when Nutting was preparing to open the West Sacramento bistro Franquette, he tapped Echeri, and plans to again when he co-opens the highly anticipated Mexican restaurant Pedregal—which will pair up Michelin-rated chefs Brad Cecchi of Canon and Patricio Wise of Nixtaco—in Folsom very soon.

“This excitement for dinnerware from Sacramento pivoted into something unexpected,” Alejandra says. Luis embraced experimentation with mold-making and other techniques to ramp up production. “Dinner plates proved a particularly tough challenge to get right,” he says. The problem: They kept breaking, until he eventually figured it out.

Echeri’s design palette often includes graphical and whimsical elements like polka dots.

Today, Echeri supplies dinnerware, mugs and the like to a bevy of local establishments like Beast & Bounty, Estelle Bakery & Pâtisserie, Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates, and Camellia Coffee Roasters. And when Colossus invited them to craft a ceramic lampshade for their HGTV show Mash-Up Our Home, they began making light fixtures. “I’ve heard from local interior designers that they have to go to the Bay Area to purchase this stuff,” Alejandra says. “So I’m like, ‘OK, we can do this. We just have to develop it.’ ”

Echeri also shares its clients’ farm-to-fork ethos in its approach to materials. Its signature speckled porcelain clay is as local as the ingredients the chefs showcase when serving their creations using the couple’s hand-thrown and slip-cast trays, plates, bowls and mugs. The duo create their own glazes in a carefully curated color palette that includes a pearlescent pink shot through with gold, a dreamy seafoam green, and pink inspired by the houses of East Sacramento that Alejandra loves, with pops of a red that’s perfect for polka dotting. Their style is whimsical, with occasional echoes of the bold graphics of the ’60s, but rusticated and earthy.

The Magañas locally source a speckled porcelain clay for many of their creations. (Courtesy of Echeri Ceramics)

While the new site is primarily a working studio, it also includes a small retail component where shoppers are welcome by appointment to browse the open shelves of stock available to purchase from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday—or sign up for one of the many weekend classes Echeri offers, after which attendees can do the same.

On a rainy Saturday morning in March, I show up for a class on making trinket dishes, joining four other women at folding worktables draped with rustic linens and laid out with palettes, tools and materials as artfully arranged as any five-star restaurant place settings—an elevated, adultified version of a kids’ craft table. (Echeri began hosting near-weekly workshops for the public in November—on everything from making mugs to flower pots and vases—just to spread good cheer and share the Magañas’ love of ceramics.) Alejandra is a patient teacher, demonstrating how we should roll out clay to form our dishes’ sides, then score the bases with a tool to prepare to join them. “I personally believe that everyone is creative,” she says. “It’s like a muscle that we need to use.”

One young attorney at my table makes her dishes in the shape of ghosts, while her friend, also an attorney, fashions hers into fluted abstractions. We mold, pat and carve for over an hour, chatting breezily—something about our childlike crafting is more conducive to conversation than sitting on a barstool ever could be, the slippery potential of the clay to become anything at all more mind-expanding than any bottled spirit. At the end, we tick off our glazing preferences and run through the raindrops to our cars. Our trinket dishes will be ready to pick up after firing in the kiln.

Like Nutting and those prescient holiday shoppers, I’ve experienced the Echeri effect, and it now seems almost unthinkable that I should go home to eat my lovingly homemade meals off plates made by some brutish machine—not when I could be dining off dishes lovingly molded from local clay, by the hands of artists whose mission in life is to bring a little bit of Sacramento soul to the table. echericeramics.com

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