For Silicon Slopes, and everyone else who works in tech
Pottery for engineers.
A community pottery studio in Draper, a short drive off I-15 from the Lehi tech corridor. A lot of our best members write software for a living, and they tend to approach a lump of clay the way only a technical brain does. It is a good thing to watch.
The habit that makes you good at your job works against you here. That is not a warning.
The short version. The Clay Hole is a nearly 10,000 square foot community pottery studio at 12896 S Pony Express Rd in Draper, Utah. Memberships run from $145 to $275 a month and include instructed classes, open studio, a shelf of your own and 650+ brush-on glazes.
This part of the site is written for people who work in tech. Not because we sell them something different, but because the questions they ask are different, and because there is a real and slightly annoying reason the wheel is harder for them at the start.
Starting with the unflattering part
No famous tech founder does this.
We went looking, properly, because a list of household names who throw pots would have been an easy thing to put on this page. There is no such list. Not one A-list technology founder, chief executive or well known investor is documented anywhere as a potter.
So here is what is true instead, which we think is better.
A physicist who left
Lee Middleman spent more than two decades as a Silicon Valley technology executive with a Stanford physics doctorate and more than forty patents behind him. He took up ceramics in 1999 and became a working artist. On why: “I like things precise; some people call it control, but I call it mastery.”
An engineer who stayed
Maria Irimie, a software consultant at Atomic Object, published a post on her own firm’s engineering blog titled I Am a Better Programmer Because of Pottery. Her words: “Pottery for me has served as a meditative practice and helped me understand how to be patient with myself, my work, and with others.”
A string theorist who does both
Nadav Drukker runs theoretical physics at King’s College London and throws pots carrying his own equations. He has published on the practice in Leonardo. Asked what connects the two, his answer was “the easiest answer is me; I create both.”
And the part that is actually useful
There is a named construct in motor learning research called reinvestment. In short: consciously monitoring and verbally controlling your own movements disrupts the movement. People differ, stably and measurably, in how much they do that.
Decomposing a problem, narrating each step, checking your work as you go. That is most of what a good engineer does all day, and it is close to the worst possible way to center a lump of clay. Your hands have to be allowed to learn it without you supervising.
Which means the first few sessions are not a talent problem. They are a habit problem, and the habit is one you are paid for.
Honest caveat, because this audience checks: the reinvestment mechanism is debated in the literature, and at least one study of adults learning a new physical skill found that heightened movement awareness did not clearly hurt performance. We think the framing holds. We are not going to pretend it is settled.
The studio, as a spec sheet
The numbers, before the sales pitch.
Most studio websites make you dig for this. Here it is in one table.
| What | How many |
|---|---|
| Pottery wheels | 29, plus a kick wheel and a mini wheel |
| Kilns | 4 |
| Floor space | nearly 10,000 square feet |
| Brush-on glazes | 650+ |
| Underglazes | 150+ |
| Dipping glaze buckets | 7 |
| Slab molds | 248, of which 148 are unique shapes |
| Slab rollers | Two, plus a wall extruder and a pug mill |
| Bisque firing | cone 05, and it is free |
| Glaze firing | cone 5½, which means a twelve minute hold at the top |
| Firing charge | 5 cents a cubic inch, $4.80 minimum, capped at $600 a piece |
| Instructors in an instructed class | Four |
| Days open | 7 a week |
| Studio opened | March 2025 |
The firing charge is measured on the bounding box of the piece, so a wide flat platter costs more than a tall narrow vase of the same volume. The calculator does that arithmetic for you.
What the research actually says
Four findings worth knowing.
We looked this up properly rather than repeating the usual wellness copy. Every study below is named, and where a finding is weaker than the internet makes it sound, we say so.
Recovery
Rest is not the mechanism
A study of 341 employees, then 92 US Air Force captains rated by their own colleagues, found that creative activity outside work predicted recovery mainly through mastery, the sense of being stretched by something difficult. Simply switching off was not significant.
Doing something hard beats doing nothing. That is an awkward finding if your plan for burnout is more time on the sofa.
The clay itself
It is the material, not the craft
A randomized trial of 106 outpatients compared clay work against a matched non-clay art activity. The clay group improved on depression, general health and wellbeing. The other art group did not reach significance.
Because the control was also art, the result points at clay specifically rather than at making things in general.
Not just fidgeting
Clay beat a stress ball
A separate trial of 102 people compared handling clay against squeezing a stress ball. Clay won.
Which rules out the obvious objection, that any repetitive thing in your hands would do.
Perfectionism
The trait that costs you most is worst at work
A meta-analysis found perfectionistic concerns, the fear of falling short rather than the drive to do well, correlate with burnout at r = .44, and that the association is strongest in the work domain.
A room where you are allowed to make something genuinely bad, in public, on purpose, is doing more than it looks like it is doing.
Where we are not going to overclaim
Three things get repeated online that we checked and will not print. There is no citable figure for pottery’s growth as a hobby. There is no documented case of a named technology company offering pottery as a staff benefit. And there is no good evidence that working with your hands is neurologically different from screen-based leisure, however much it feels that way. The better supported idea is that screen leisure tends to get cancelled out by the guilt that follows it.
- Eschleman, Madsen, Alarcon & Barelka, Benefiting from creative activity, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 87(3), 2014. doi:10.1111/joop.12064
- Nan & Ho, Effects of clay art therapy on adults outpatients with major depressive disorder, Journal of Affective Disorders 217, 2017.
- Kimport & Robbins, Efficacy of creative clay work for reducing negative mood, Art Therapy 29(2), 2012.
- Hill & Curran, Multidimensional perfectionism and burnout: a meta-analysis, Personality and Social Psychology Review 20(3), 2016.
The learning curve
It is harder than it looks. We would rather you heard that from us.
Most people get clay centered within one to three sessions, which surprises them. Then about three quarters of what they make in week one collapses anyway, which surprises them more. By week four it is roughly half, and by month three it is around one in five.
Those are our own numbers. We publish them because the people who quit almost never quit because it was hard. They quit in the week when everything died, having decided it meant something about them.
On staying: people who arrive intending to learn the craft average about seven months. People who start on a deal to try the wheel, with no plan past that, average about eight weeks. Most people know which one they are before they book.
The documentation
We built the reference material we wanted to exist.
None of this is behind the membership. It is on the open site, it works on a phone in the studio, and it is the part of The Clay Hole that people with technical jobs tend to find first.
The two on paper
A printed index into a live database.
The Glaze Bible is 255 printed pages of fired glaze swatches. Every glaze opening carries a code you scan, which opens that glaze’s own page online, with the full record behind it. The PDF is free.
The Book of Molds does the same job for the slab molds: 52 pages, scan one and it opens online so you can save it to your list. That PDF is free too.
We mention this here because the people who get it immediately are usually the people who have built something similar at work. A paper artifact with a stable identifier pointing at the canonical record. It is a pleasant thing to hold and it does not go out of date.
The rest of it
Where to go next.
Seven pages. Each one answers a single question properly rather than half answering five.
Hobbies for software engineers
Six hands-on hobbies compared honestly, including the ones we would send you to instead of this one.
Compare them
Is pottery hard to learn?
Yes, at the start, and analytical people have a measurably harder time of it than most. Here is why, and how long it lasts.
Read the honest answer
How a pottery wheel actually works
Rotational symmetry, plastic deformation, water as lubricant, and why the wall thins as it rises.
See the mechanism
Hobbies for burnout and perfectionism
What the recovery research says, why perfectionistic worry tracks burnout hardest at work, and what a room full of bad pots is for.
Read it
Screen free hobbies for adults
Why resting harder does not work, what a difficult physical activity does instead, and the one claim about screens we will not make.
Read it
An offsite for an engineering team
Three hours, up to 48 people, and nobody goes home with a mug. That last part is deliberate.
See how it runs
Pottery near Silicon Slopes
Getting here from the corridor, the numbers on remote work and loneliness in this valley, and what a third place is actually for.
Read it
How membership works
Four levels. Month to month.
The only real difference between the levels is how many instructed classes you get and how much shelf you get. Everything else in the building is the same for everybody.
| Level | A month | Classes a month | Your shelf |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green Level | $145 | 4 | half of a divided shelf |
| Yellow Level | $170 | 5 | a taller half-shelf |
| Purple Level | $200 | 6 | a private shelf |
| Black Level | $275 | 8 | the biggest private shelf |
There is no contract and no joining fee. Cancel before the 24th of the month and you are not billed again.
What it actually costs
The membership is not the whole bill.
Here is the part most studios leave you to discover on your own.
- Clay is extra. A 25 pound bag starts at $28, and every level above Green Level takes a few dollars off that.
- Glaze firing is extra. 5 cents a cubic inch of bounding box, $4.80 minimum, capped at $600 for one piece. Bisque firing is free.
- Dipping glazes are extra at the lower levels. Purple Level Members get six of the 7 buckets included. Black Level Members get all 7.
- Tools are yours. A basic kit is not much, and you will end up wanting your own anyway.
A realistic first month for somebody at Green Level who throws a fair amount is the membership plus a bag or two of clay plus firing on whatever survives. The firing calculator will give you a real number rather than a guess.
Bringing a team
Nobody goes home with a mug. That is the entire point.
Three hours, up to 48 people, and at the end of it everything anybody made is still wet and still here. A studio that promises your team a finished mug at the end of one evening is cutting corners somewhere, usually by handing people something half made.
Twenty two people can be on the wheels at once. Forty eight can hand build. Pieces get fired and collected later, which is how pottery actually works.
It lands well with engineering teams in particular, for a reason that is easy to miss: nobody is good at it, including the manager, and everybody can see that nobody is good at it.
Getting here from the corridor
Draper, which is the convenient part.
The studio sits just off I-15 in Draper. There is a FrontRunner station and a TRAX Blue Line station in Draper, but neither one lands you at our door, so plan on driving. If you do come in on the train, a rideshare for the last stretch is the practical way to finish the trip.
Mean commute times across the surrounding cities run between about 23 and 27 minutes, which is to say the studio is not the hard part of the evening.
Questions we actually get
The ones worth answering here.
How long before I make something I would keep?
Longer than you want and sooner than you fear. The first thing most people keep is not the first thing they are proud of, and the gap between those two is where the whole hobby lives.
We wrote a whole page on the timeline rather than guessing at it here.
What happens if I miss a week?
Nothing. Classes do not roll over, so an unused class is gone, but nothing is penalized and nothing expires beyond that month.
If a stretch of work is going to eat a month, pausing is cheaper than cancelling and restarting.
Is there a contract?
No. It is month to month. Cancel before the 24th and you are not billed again.
Do I need to buy tools before the first class?
No. Everything needed for a first class is here. Most people buy their own kit within a month or two because they develop preferences, which is a good sign rather than an expense.
I am not artistic. Is that a problem?
It is close to irrelevant on the wheel, which is mostly a physical skill with a lot of geometry in it. Being unartistic is not what makes the first month hard. Being unwilling to be bad at something is.
Can I come in outside class times?
Yes. Open studio runs alongside the instructed classes and the building is open 7 a week. The schedule page has the current times.
That is the tour
The wheel does not care what you do for a living.
Which is, for a lot of people who end up here, the single best thing about it. Three hours a week where the only thing being evaluated is whether the wall stayed even, and where nobody in the room knows what your job title is unless you tell them.