Fired up: Makkum designs that make cents

Milan – Heritage brands such as Waterford Wedgwood failed, we believe, because they refused to engage with design as a mechanism to boost brand profile, and with designers themselves as a way to add value, relevance and narrative to their product offer. Dutch ceramics firm Royal Tichelaar Makkum is taking a different route.

Pushing ceramics to new markets and uses, the centuries-old company has worked with industrial designer Dick van Hoff to reshape the traditional tile stove in a way that extends the brand’s ownership of the kitchen while strengthening its position as a traditional brand keen to embrace innovation. Targeting affluent, 35-45-year-old consumers determined to pursue a more low-key, stay-at-home lifestyle, the stove is a carefully crafted ‘lifestyle’ product, van Hoff says, that still excels as a wood-burning stove. Aesthetics here have been carefully combined with tradition, craft and superlative function.

Royal Tichelaar Makkum takes the same approach in its collaboration with Lonny van Ryswyck and Nadine Sterk at Atelier NL on the ‘Drawn from Clay’ project. Here, van Ryswyck and Sterk have created a series of plates and bowls using clay and earth collected from different parts of the Netherlands. The raw materials were transformed into a pottery table service that reflects the colours and earthy characteristics of the regions from which they were drawn. Further underpinning their sense of geography (and adding a powerful market story to the product in the process) are the hand-painted designs of Ika Kuenzel, each depicting old and modern views of the landscapes from which the clays originated.