The Art of Slowing Down: Inside Joe Cariati’s New Collection, Riposo
I’ve known glassblower and designer Joe Cariati for nearly twenty five years, dating back to the early days of his career, when I had the pleasure of helping place his work with one of his first retail accounts.
Since then, I’ve watched Joe build the Cariati brand and develop a distinctive language in glass that has been recognized and collected around the world. His newest collection, Riposo, is a departure - a quieter, freer body of work centered around one-of-one pieces, instinct and the simple pleasure of making.
With Riposo launching September 18, I caught up with Joe to talk about the collection, his creative process and why the human hand feels more important than ever.
Your newest collection is absolutely beautiful. Can you share the inspiration behind it and what you hoped to express through these new pieces?
Riposo is a new body of work that I chose to produce as a means to take a break from my normal routine and production.
Since 2002, I've been building the Cariati brand. At my peak, around 2016, I was making 4,000 objects a year, entirely by hand — no molds, each one built one by one, but all to specification.
Riposo is the opposite of that. It's literally one of one, each piece unique, no calipers, no order sheets, total freedom to create and respond in the moment.
I'll be releasing eight total arrangements — one price, one home, not split up and no special orders. A true capsule collection.
What first drew you to glass as a creative medium?
My mother was the first person to suggest I try glassblowing when I was about eighteen. That went in one ear and out the other.
Later, when I got to college, I saw someone blowing glass and thought I had to try it. That was it — I was hooked.
Everything about the process fits my personality perfectly. It's a team effort, which I really enjoy. It's intense, fluid and active. In that sense, it's much like the practice of music or dance, engaging your body and your brain while also being able to let go and move with the material.
To this day, hot glass is my greatest teacher.
Where does an idea begin for you?
For my core collection, the initial idea was to create mid-century modern-inspired objects to fill a gap I saw in the retail landscape at the time.
Right now I'm focused on Riposo, thinking about ceramic forms, Japanese forms, Morandi's still-life paintings, and then trying to forget about all the references at the same time and just create beautiful objects that mesh together.
Your pieces feel like both functional objects and works of art. How do you think about beauty and the objects we choose to live with?
I consider my pieces to be decorative objects.
One of the things I've thought about along the way is creating future heirlooms - objects that can be passed down, admired by family members, visitors and collectors.
I think it's important to have some pieces in your home that are purely decorative, that stop time for a moment in your day so you can enjoy the things you have truly considered to be with you.
In a world filled with mass-produced objects, why do you think people are increasingly drawn to things made by hand?
I think there will always be a place for handmade objects in the world. People have always wanted something with a hand behind it.
But I do think we're in a particular moment right now. Social media has made it possible for makers to show the process, not just the finished object. People want to see the labor, the mess, the repetition, the thing before it becomes precious.
Add AI into the mix and it accelerates that even more. When anyone can generate a perfect image of anything in seconds, an object that took me a full hour at the bench, with my own hands and molten hot glass, starts to feel almost radical.
People aren't just buying an object. They're buying proof that a person made a choice, in real time, with real consequences if it went wrong.
Is there a particular part of creating Riposo that has felt especially meaningful to you?
Honestly, I've always been a little guilty of treating the finished object as the residue of my work. The object is the leftover. What actually matters to me is what happens in the moment — how I performed that day and how I felt after being at the bench for hours with my team.
Riposo broke that pattern for me.
I found myself racing to the studio every morning to see what I'd made the day before, studying it, getting excited about it, then placing it next to its counterparts to see how they lived together.
I spent countless hours moving pieces, stepping back and studying the negative space between forms, almost like I was painting in three dimensions. The editing and curating ended up being just as intensive as the making.
Every arrangement in the series is one of one. Once it's built, signed and sold, it is gone.
I'm dropping the entire series on September 18th, which happens to be my fifty-fifth birthday, and I can't wait to release them.
After nearly twenty-five years of watching Joe's work evolve, Riposo feels like a beautiful new chapter — less about repetition and production, and more about instinct, curiosity and the joy of creating something that will exist only once.
Riposo launches September 18, 2026.
Photography courtesy of Joe Cariati