A 1986 vessel by Dame Magdalene Odundo sold for £225,000 at Lyon & Turnbull's Modern Made sale in London on 28 October, fifteen times its £15,000 top estimate. The 27.5cm-high Untitled Vessel, in the burnished and carbonised terracotta that is the Kenyan-born potter's signature medium, was the standout lot of the sale and the second-highest price ever paid for her work.

Odundo holds the auction record for a work by any living ceramic artist, and the result confirms how far her market has travelled since the vendor bought the vessel more than 25 years ago, when studio pottery commanded far more modest sums. A smaller Odundo bowl from the same sale, a burnished terracotta piece shown in the Royal College of Art degree show in 1982, made £31,450.

The Modern Made sale also featured a group of 23 pieces of 1930s furniture by Gerald Summers, the interwar designer who made simple plywood furniture under the name Makers of Simple Furniture. The Summers lots made more than £205,000 between them, led by a 1933–34 armchair made from a single sheet of birch plywood at £25,200, against an estimate of £7,000 to £9,000, and a rare Isokon trolley at £35,200.

The sale was one of four in Lyon & Turnbull's Design Season, a series that totalled £2.65 million. It began in Edinburgh on 12 October with Design since 1860, where a Mackintosh ladderback chair made £32,700, and a Lalique sale on 27 October was led by a Caravelle table centrepiece at £75,200. Taken together, the series showed strong demand across studio ceramics, interwar design and decorative glass, with the Odundo vessel setting the pace.