Artek’s Famous Finnish Tea Trolley Gets a California Twist From Heath Ceramics
Spend just about any amount of time in the Bay Area, and you’ll most likely eat off of Heath ceramics, though you’re forgiven if you don’t notice it. There’s something about a Heath piece that makes it both stand out and blend into its environment: The shape that fits comfortably between cupped hands, the earthy color palate, the slightly gritty-textured finish (as though it’s been scrubbed by the salt of the Pacific Ocean). If Joni Mitchell was a ceramics company, it would look something like this. They call their speckled blue “frost gunmetal,” but it looks like nothing so much as the mist surrounding Treasure Island; a persimmony-red resembles the cables and beams of the Golden Gate Bridge. You’ll find Heath pieces on tables at Chez Panisse, at the new Napa up-and-comer Charter Oak, and in the fifth-floor cafe at the San Francisco MoMA.
For 70 years, the company has been filling not only restaurants but registries with their iconic tableware, and decorating bathrooms and kitchens as well, with an occasional museum thrown into the mix. Its factories produce approximately 400,000 square feet of tiles a year—a relatively small tally compared to some major manufacturers, but a significant amount when you consider that the company limits its production to what it can produce at its two factories in San Francisco and Sausalito, a scale that lets husband and wife owners Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey preserve the aesthetics, quality, and ethos of the organization.
On a recent weekend at the San Francisco factory, visitors milled about the showroom, circling the graphic tiled arrangements. Upstairs, in the sunny room where director of Heath Clay Studio, Tung Chiang, dreams up the company’s next endeavors, several prototypes of the company’s latest collaboration stood, waiting for its unveiling. This week, Heath launches a set of stools and a tea trolley, building off the iconic design by Finnish company Artek.
The collaboration between Heath and Artek (which included among its founders Aino and Alvar Aalto, responsible for the original stool and tea trolley design) is the product of an almost two-year gestation. Chiang had collected vintage pieces from the company for years, so when the opportunity arose for a collaborative project, it seemed a natural fit. “There are so many parallels between Artek and Heath,” Bailey says. “We’ve both maintained the original factories”—from the 1930s and 40s—”and we’ve modernized, but not when it’s going to affect the integrity of the product.”
Maintaining the integrity of this latest product is at the forefront of Bailey’s mind. For Artek, Bailey explains, the trolley was inspired by British tea culture—the rituals and formality connected to the act of serving—as well as Japanese woodwork and architecture. The Heath interpretation maintains the traditional wood-bending technique utilized in the construction of the original item, but allowed the San Francisco company to play around a little with the tiled top, originally a pure white arrangement. “The tiles are basically like a little mural,” says Chiang. “It’s kind of like a canvas to bring the design to a place it hasn’t gone before.”
This has resulted in six different tiled designs, ranging from a pattern evocative of the smudgy midnight sky to a Southwest-flavored "landscape" tableau, to a "deep sea" arrangement telling of watery depths. "To produce 16 perfect tiles," Chiang tells me, "is almost like perfecting a painting. If one tile is slightly chipped or not 'doing well' in the whole arrangement, we do the whole set again." The labor involved is one factor that goes into the price ($6,800). "This is a piece of art," Bailey asserts. "The most important thing is to get it right."
