About Us

    

Hello and welcome to our cozy little corner!

As our shop name suggests we love to create cute and cozy home decor items. We offer a range of handmade ceramic products for the home. Any of our items can be a unique and thoughtful gift for life's special occasions from a birthday to Mother's day or a wedding celebration and more!

We are a husband and wife team: my name is Ilona, I love handcrafts, while my husband Darius works with pottery and tracery. Darius and I are both very romantic and slightly sentimental - you might be able to tell this from our handcrafted products, many of which feature whimsical themes such as lovebirds, hearts and butterflies. We live with our baby son in the picturesque heart of the Lithuanian countryside far, far away from the noise of the big cities.

Although Darius studied ceramics and had worked with that medium in the past, by the time we met he was working in another field and had almost completely forgotten about pottery. We both stayed busy with our office jobs for several years at the beginning of our relationship, but Darius' mind eventually wandered back to ceramics. When he showed me some of the pieces he had made, it was obvious to me that he had a true passion for working with clay and that the items he made needed to be seen by the world!

It took me about a year and a half to convince him to pick up where he had left off with his ceramics designs. His return to pottery began slowly with a pile of clay appearing in our house one day, then glazes joined the clay and soon various pottery making tools began turning up too! I was so happy and proud to see Darius rediscovering those almost-forgotten skills! Every day he spent more and more time working on his clay pieces until it came to a point where we realized we had reached a crossroads in our lives: we had to decide whether or not to pursue a ceramics business full time.

After a lot of soul searching, we decided to take the plunge and, although leaving our secure "day jobs" was a terrifying decision at the time, it has now been over five years since Cozy Home Ideas has been our main source of income and we have never looked back! We love the freedom of being our own bosses and this has become even more important since our long-awaited son was born four years ago. We have been able to slow down the pace of our work and fit our business around his schedule to reach a balance that suits our family perfectly. That said, we both constantly have new ideas for products, but those new concepts are waiting patiently in the wings and will slowly come to light as we grow our business!

Darius' favorite part of making ceramics is the cut openwork and he spends a long time perfecting each piece, manually hand carving the tiny details in clay. This intricate cutwork is what makes his pieces so distinctive and beautiful -- especially with candles inside them. We have a running joke between us that if we ever open a "brick and mortar" shop, it would have to be exclusively open during the hours of darkness to best showcase the openwork by candlelight!

Feel free to send us a message if you have an idea for a custom order based on one of our current designs. 

Ilona and Darius