About Us

About

A Hong Kong company that puts pictures on trays

Twelve designs. We commission the artwork, choose the board and the frame, and a workshop builds the trays to our files. That is the whole business.

Hands squaring a stack of wooden tray frames on a workshop bench beside a tin of wax — Frames squared before assembly. The rim is the part you touch every time you pick the tray up, so it is the part worth getting right.

Where the pictures come from

Every image on a Jovrenta tray was drawn for us and belongs to us. The animals are watercolours — a sheep, a lion, a hedgehog, three dogs — painted as portraits rather than cartoons. The plants are botanical plates in the nineteenth-century manner, without the Latin names printed underneath.

We say this plainly because a lot of printed homeware is not like that. There is no licensed character on any tray we sell, nothing lifted from a stock library, and nothing that belongs to another illustrator. If you recognise one of our animals from somewhere else, tell us, because that would be a mistake we would want to fix.

Close detail of a lap tray corner where the wood rim meets the printed surface, with the fabric cushion visible underneath — The join, close up: wood rim, rounded inner lip, printed board, and the cushion tucked underneath it.

The object itself

A lap tray is three parts pretending to be one. A printed board, a wooden rim with a rounded inner lip, and a bean-filled fabric cushion underneath that takes the shape of your legs.

The lip is the detail that matters and the one most trays skip. Without it a mug slides the moment you shift; with it the mug stops. The cushion does the other half of the work — it is what stops the tray tipping when you lean forward to reach something.

The two navy serving trays are a different object entirely: faux leather over a rigid board, deep stitched sides, no cushion. They are for carrying, not for sitting on your knees.

The boring parts we take seriously

Sizes on this site are given as approximate, because trimming and upholstery move by a few millimetres across a run and we would rather say so than quote a number we cannot hold. Where a tray is heat resistant we say to what temperature. Where it is not, we say that too — the four botanical trays are rated to about 90°C and the six animal trays are not, which is the kind of difference that only matters once, when you put a fresh mug down.

A cushioned lap tray resting across someone's lap on a sofa with a mug of tea and a folded newspaper — The actual use case. Most trays sold as decor never get used like this; ours are built assuming they will be.

What it is for

Breakfast in bed, a laptop on the sofa, a jigsaw, a cup of tea and a newspaper for an hour. 44 cm across takes a 13-inch laptop with room beside it for a mug.

If you want a decorative tray to leave on an ottoman with a candle on it, the navy serving trays suit that better and we will say so if you ask. We would rather point you at the right one than take the return.

Three things we do not do

We do not print custom names or photographs on trays — the run sizes do not work. We do not sell the artwork as prints, posters or cards. And we do not claim these are handmade: the artwork is drawn by hand, the trays are manufactured, and conflating the two would be a lie that is easy to tell and easy to catch.

Jovrenta is a trading name of UNI-HOPE TECHNOLOGY LIMITED, registered in Hong Kong SAR, Suite A, 6/F, Ritz Plaza, 122 Austin Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. Questions of any kind: info@jovrenta.com. Materials and cleaning are set out on Care & Materials.