James and Christie Brown

Founders of Blue Mountain School, London

Collectors and curators James and Christie Brown are the founding duo behind Blue Mountain School, a six-storey multidisciplinary space in east London. It comprises a gallery, a retail store and archive of commissioned pieces, a restaurant and residency spaces. Blue Mountain School was born in 2018 from the pair’s menswear business, Hostem. Recent exhibitions have included ‘Tsubos’, which presented Japanese ceramic artist Kazunori Hamana’s reinterpretations of traditional Japanese storage jars, made from clay dug near his farm in Shiga prefecture, and ‘The Age of the Beaker’, an exhibition of salt-glazed tableware by London- and Wales-based potter Steve Harrison. Blue Mountain School plays host to artists, designers and makers through its residency programme. Upcoming projects include a collaboration with the conservation organisation Wildland, which will see an art foundation, guesthouse and restaurant open in the Scottish Highlands in 2028.

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