Our Story

Kiln House began in 2018 with a single wheel in a friend's garage in Northeast Portland. June Park had spent eight years writing software, the last two quietly miserable about it, and she'd taken a sabbatical to figure out what was next. A pottery class at a community center turned into a borrowed wheel, then a borrowed kiln, then a Sunday open-studio for friends who wanted to learn alongside her.

By the end of that first year, the garage was full. So in 2020 — through a pandemic, against everyone's advice — June signed a five-year lease on a former auto-body shop on Maker Lane. The bones were perfect: concrete floors that could take clay slip, twelve-foot ceilings for kilns, big industrial windows facing north for even, soft light. It took six months of weekends to scrape the floors, paint the walls, and run the gas lines for our three kilns.

We opened with four students and one class on the schedule. Six years later we run thirty classes a month, host two studio sales a year, and rent shelf space to twenty-two resident artists whose work fills the front shop. Some of those original students are now Open Studio members who come in twice a week. A few have become instructors.

We are not a tourist workshop. The wheels are real, the clay is real, the kilns are real and they fire to cone 10. Everyone who comes through the door — whether you've thrown a hundred pots or you're touching clay for the first time — gets the same patient instruction and the same hot cup of tea while you wait for your piece to be wedged.