“It was a friend who used it to put their partner’s ashes in,” Tunks says. “Not an incredibly joyful way to start a business but it had meaning and it had power and it showed me that someone loved what I was doing enough to put something of great value in it.”

Bison turns 21 this year, and is celebrating with a retrospective display of pieces from throughout the years. Milk bottles, penguins, mixing bowls, the wildly popular poplar designs, Tunks has been up in the attic of the Pialligo store, opening boxes, rekindling memories of colours and pieces that have shaped the Bison journey.

There’s a few solid pieces, a cylindrical vessel, a teapot, in a greyish green he calls reef, which belonged to his late father, some of the first pieces he ever made.

There’s a crackle plate with a fish motif on it, his partner had bought him a stamp and he thought he was being very clever.

A squat blue jug with little of the refinement that the present pieces possess.

He’s getting a little sentimental, wiping the dust of things, thinking of where an urge to develop his creative side has taken him.

“Growing up I thought I was going to be a career diplomat because I loved languages, I loved international travel, I loved the whole idea of living abroad,” he says.

“But the creative side was always bubbling ... I did music, sung, played in a jazz band, you realise there's a direction you want to go but you're not quite sure what it is.”

Tunks found his direction while he was finishing his Masters thesis, in classics, ancient history and archaeology at the Australian National University.

“I’d spent many years in Syria excavating but all the pieces were broken and I loved the idea of creating something that was simple and beautiful and timeless in the same way.

“Touching these pieces was incredibly emotive and personal, unless you do it, you can't understand how it feels, picking up something that somebody else made, it may still even have their fingerprints on it from 2000 years ago, their story is in that piece.”

A good designer should be a storyteller, he says.

“You're conveying something that has meaning for you to other people.

“The fascinating thing is seeing if they get that.”

And more often than not, they do, he says. There is no bigger compliment.

“The new range of glass tumblers were inspired by those aluminium cups we had as children, remember those, in six different colours and if you were really lucky they came in a zip-up case, my family would take them water skiing and my brother and I would fight over the colours.

“People get that when I tell them the story and it’s great to watch them revisit some element of their childhood.”

At 53, Tunks says he has no regrets from the past 21 years. It was a sad day when he had to move production from Pialligo to overseas in 2012, he admits that but he’d been seriously ill and it made him reevaluate not only the business but his life.

“I realised when I couldn't lift a spray can anymore to spray a glaze that I had completely fallen out of love with production and the process and what I was doing.

“The business side had chewed up my life and the creative side was absent and that was the part I loved.”

That said, he says, the outsourcing has allowed him to branch out, opening the store in Braddon and expanding the range to include fabrics, wood and most recently glass.

Display shelves of the eponymous Brian Tunks cut glass vases and beakers and bowls, twinkle by the windows. They’re gorgeous pieces with vertical lines, in shades of greens and pinks and blues.

“Moving into glass was all about translucency,” he says.

“While you can get certain translucency with porcelain and stonewares, it’s not the same.

“When you photograph glass, with the sunshine streaming through it, shadows flow like liquid colour.

“Colour has always been at the heart of Bison.”

The Bison retrospective will be on display at the Pialligo store from November 4-18. Tunks will also give talks about the evolution from ancient historian to maker to design company on Saturday, November 10, and Saturday, November 17, at 3pm at Pialligo. The Braddon store is featuring in a walking trail during the Design Canberra festival.