Harbaugh_Final

EDITED BY ARIANNE HARBAUGH

HEATH CERAMICS

HEATH CERAMICS

Copyright Š 2016 by Arianne Harbaugh. All rights reserved.

Designed for GR 330: Typography 3: Complex Hierarchy at the Academy of Art University during the 2016 Spring semester, taught by Lian Ng. The typeface is Avenir LT Std designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988.

The paper is 100# Premium Matte Paper (148 GSM.) Concept, book design, and typesetting by Arianne Harbaugh.

Text and images from sources listed in the bibliography.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the permission from the designer.

Designed & edited in Torrance, CA; Printed & bound in San Francisco, CA by Blurb. www.heathceramics.com

Dedicated to my husband, Nader, for enduring my sleepless nights and painful cram sessions over the past few years.

I can see the finish line — it’s almost over!

CHAPTER 1 // THE LEGACY 16–71

CHAPTER 0 // INTRODUCTION 10–15

CHAPTER 2 // A NEW BEGINNING 72–89

CHAPTER 5 // REFERENCES 126–129

CHAPTER 3 // TABLEWARE 90–109

CHAPTER 4 // TILES 110–125

CHAPTER 0 //

INTRODUCTION

12 Heath Ceramics

HEATH CERAMICS

IN BRIEF. We are a historic pottery turned designer, maker, and seller of goods that embody creativity and craftsmanship, elevate the everyday, and enhance the way people eat, live, and connect.

Founded in 1948 in Sausalito, California, Heath Ceramics is best known for ceramic tableware and architectural tile made by hand. Today, with our original dinnerware factory in Sausalito, our tile factory in San Francisco’s Mission district, and our retail showrooms in San Francisco and Los Angeles, we bring together designing, making and selling to offer beautiful, highquality goods of all types that blur the line between everyday objects and family heirlooms.

HOW WE WORK. At Heath Ceramics, we are designing our business as thoughtfully as we design and make our products. We ask “why” a lot. Experimentation thrives.

And culture and creativity rule.

WE OFFER GOODS THAT LAST. We believe in quality over quantity, only making and selling beautiful, wellmade goods that stand the test of time.

WE DESIGN AND MAKE AND SELL. Being responsible for it all means that we’re better at each aspect of what we do.

WE BUILD ENVIRONMENTS AROUND OUR MISSION. From our showrooms to our factories to our offices, we’ve created spaces that bring together our people and communities to learn from each other, forge lasting bonds and create lots of good energy.

WE BELIEVE IN GROWING RESPONSIBLY. By working smart and growing prudently, we’re building a strong business that allows us to make good things and do good work. It’s also more fun than we ever imagined.

opposite // Marie Basic Dinnerware Set, Coupe Line Color: Aqua Chocolate Brown

13 Introduction

A TIMELINE OF HEATH 1948

2006

2012

Edith Heath starts Heath Ceramics.

The Cafe Bowl debuts, a part of

House Industries begins a range

Her work quickly becomes known

the dinnerware collaboration with

of collaborations with Heath, from

for its classic, functional shapes

Christina Kim and Alice Waters

house numbers to clocks.

with a beautiful range of glazes.

of Chez Panisse.

1960

2007

opens in the Mission District.

Designed in collaboration with

Heath wins the Henry award from

Marquis & Stoller, the Heath factory

the California Museum of Design.

2013

in Sausalito opens, featuring an open floor plan with air and light.

With Heath’s iconic bud vase as inspiration, Heath introduces a line

Heath’s San Francisco showroom

The San Francisco tile factory comes online.

The first event is held in the Boiler

1960s

of new vase shapes.

Design meets function in Heath’s

2008

collections and collaboration.

Heath opens a showroom and

2015

Rim Line, which features an organic, exposed clay edge for serving and durability, ideal for Heath’s growing restaurant roster.

1969

clay studio in Los Angeles.

recipient of the National Design

of the Year award.

Award for Corporate and

2010

function as a building material.

Heath opens a showroom in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic

2011

buy Heath Ceramics from the

Heath collaborates with Alabama

Heath trust.

Chanin to create a new etched

Creative Director Catherine Bailey’s first design, the Large Mug, was an

pattern, a re-imagining of the intersection of stitch and clay.

instant classic.

opposite // Heath Ceramics Timeline Mural, San Francisco, California, 2012

14 Heath Ceramics

Heath Ceramics is named the

Heath wins Bon Appetit’s Designer

Heath begins exploring tile and its

2003

Room, a space for community,

Institutional Achievement given by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Robin and Catherine authored Tile Makes The Room, which explores tile’s role in good design.

15 Introduction

CHAPTER 1 //

THE LEGACY

THE LEGACY OF EDITH HEATH & HEATH CERAMICS

THE STORY OF EDITH HEATH, the founder and driving force behind Heath Ceramics, begins in Ida Grove, a small farming town forty miles east of Sioux City, Iowa. It was here that Danish immigrants Nils and Karoline Kiertzner, settled into their new life in the heart of America’s breadbasket where they raised seven children on the family farm. The oldest was a boy named Adolph, and the second, born May 24, 1911, was a young girl they named Edith.

Life on the farm was filled with routine. For Edith, farming meant plenty of chores. The physical jobs were given to the boys while Edith helped her mother with domestic responsibilities like embroidering clothes, baking bread, and acting as a stand-in mother figure to her five younger siblings. Nils believed it was important for the children to get an education and wanted to send them all to school. Karoline didn’t agree, especially when it came to her daughters, who she knew would provide her with less help at home if they spent their days in a classroom.

She grudgingly accepted Edith’s education but never fully came to terms with her own destiny in landlocked Iowa.

Karoline’s father, a traditional Danish fisherman, had insisted she claim the “good life” waiting for her in America. She obliged by moving to Iowa with her husband but she missed the comforts of her ancestral home, including a steady diet of fresh fish, oysters, and clams. Karoline refused to speak English, surrounding herself with only the close-knit Danish community that had attracted the family to Ida Grove. Edith's mother was stubborn and surely rubbed off on Edith, influencing the headstrong young woman to follow her own desires.

opposite // Edith Heath, undated photo

18 Heath Ceramics

19 Introduction

THROUGHOUT THE 1910S AND EARLY 1920S, Nils borrowed money to purchase new farming equipment, buoyed by raising prices for wheat, corn, cattle, and hogs. However, prices began to fall in the latter half of the 1920s and the Kiertzner family fortune, which had been treading water, was utterly drowned in the stock market crash of 1929. Just before Edith’s high school graduation, the family lost their beloved farm. After the requisite auction of farm equipment and personal possessions the family was left with just their beds, a few tables and chairs, a piano, and a set of Haviland china. The latter two were spared only because other farmers in their small community could not afford to purchase these expensive items.

The Kiertzner family rode out the Depression, making do in Ida Grove. Edith took a job as a teller and bookkeeper with the Iowa Public Service Company. In two years, she was able to save enough money to travel to Chicago and in 1933 she enrolled at the Chicago Normal School (later renamed the Chicago Teachers College.) Edith's plan was to become a school teacher, a profession that was in high demand at a number of small schoolhouses across the Midwest and one she felt comfortable with, having helped raise her brothers and sisters.

The Normal School had been established in 1867 as an experimental teacher-training school housed in a leaky railroad freight car. It quickly grew into a twenty-seven room education facility with a student dormitory and onsite model grammar school. It was the only tuition-free school in the city offering a bachelor of education degree, a prospect that held appeal for Edith. It was also one of the few programs driven by the principles of the popular educational theorist John Dewey.

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Dewey had begun his career as a philosopher, however, by the mid-1890s his primary interest had shifted to education.

At the University of Chicago, Dewey established a department of pedagogy, focused on training university students to become specialists in education. Like the Normal School, Dewey’s program included a special school for children, the University Elementary School. He was acknowledged nationally for his educational philosophy, which included the idea that all elementary and high school students should be directed toward new hands-on activities that stressed problem solving and judgement over knowledge. This theory further influenced Edith’s strong independent spirit and the self-reliance that had germinated while growing up on the family farm.

"I WAS GOING BY CART AND HORSE, SIX MILES TO HIGH SCHOOL. I REMEMBER DRIVING OFF THE MORNING THE AUCTION TOOK PLACE. IT WAS IN MARCH AND IT WAS COLD AND SNOWY AND THE FARMERS GATHERED FROM ALL AROUND FOR THE AUCTION. I KNEW THAT WHEN I CAME HOME THAT EVENING EVERYTHING WOULD BE GONE. THE ONLY THINGS LEFT WERE THE BEDS, THE KITCHEN TABLE AND SOME CHAIRS, A PIANO, AND THE HAVILAND CHINA." — EDITH HEATH, a teenager in the Depression

At the Normal School , Edith also learned about art education, the required subject matter that educators were expected to learn and understand in all aspects of the classroom and lesson plans that involved an amount of creativity, and she found herself to be a gifted art teacher.

After graduating in 1934, she enrolled part-time at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she took an art history classes with Helen Gardner, whose

Karolina Kiertzner is surrounded by her own children, as well as nieces and nephews in Ida Grove. Edith stands in the top row, second from the right, 1920.

book Art Through the Ages was then, and still remains, a seminal art historical reference book.

Edith also took her first ceramics class at the Institute where she nervously looked forward to seeing the kiln reveal its hidden treasure: the still mysterious fusing of clay and glaze.

To cover room, board, art school tuition, along with other expenses, she accepted a job at one of Chicago’s settlement houses, the Howell Neighborhood House located in a predominantly Polish and Czech enclave. The settlement movement, founded in England and adopted in the late 1800s by American’s educated classes, sought to relieve poverty and despair in the urban core.

Settlement houses often served recent immigrants, helping them adjust and also get a leg up in their new country through both education and advocacy. One of the most famous Chicago settlement house was Jane Addams’s Hull House.

Addams, a young girl from Cedarville, Illinois, had lost both parents by the age of twenty-one.

In the 1880s, she embarked on a grand tour of Europe, witnessing the extreme urban poverty in Lindon and other large cities across the continent. Perhaps somewhat sheltered before the trip, Addams was shaken by what she saw and was moved by the work of the few relief agencies acting on behalf of the underprivileged.

21 Chapter 1

22 Heath Ceramics

The most notable relief agency was Toynbee Hall in London’s Whitechapel neighborhood. Toynbee Hall was much different from other relief agencies because they engaged many people across class lines and provided them with seemingly limitless educational opportunities.

BACK IN CHICAGO, at the age of twenty-nine, Addams, together with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, established the Hull House in a dilapidated mansion on the west side of the city. The doors opened on September 18, 1889, with a mission to “provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.” Hull House, over the years, spawned a generation of settlement houses like the Howell Neighborhood House and defined a movement by improving living conditions while simultaneously coordinating clubs, classes, lectures, and art exhibitions. It was at Hull House, in early March 1901, that architect Frank Lloyd Wright gave his famous speech, “The Art and Craft of the Machine," in which he encouraged the modern artist to accept and direct the machine age and embrace it as a source of democracy and new possibility.

Edith spent three years living and working at the Howell neighborhood House and appreciated the difference she made in the lives of the less fortunate. During the mornings, she took classes at the Art Institute, in the afternoons she taught art to young children and in the early evenings to high school students, and at night to adults. Edith eventually moved out of the settlement house to a small apartment near the University of Chicago campus and began teaching under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project (FAP.) The WPA, a government relief measure that had started in 1935, offered work to the unemployed on a massive scale. The FAP, under the WPA umbrella, provided jobs and education to unemployed artists and was responsible for over four hundred thousand works of art in hundreds of public buildings around the country. Edith was invited to work at an FAP training school located on an old army post in Batavia, Illinois. The brainchild of the FAP national director Holger Cahill and the Bauhaus artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy, Batavia was a job training program with summer-camp appeal.

opposite // The story of Edith Heath, pictured here in a photograph from the early 1940s, is the story of American modernism.

23 Chapter 1

Cahill, born Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson in Iceland, grew up in the farming communities of western Canada and North Dakota. He worked as a cattle driver in Nebraska, as a clerical worker in Minnesota, on ore boats in the Great Lakes, and as a short-order cook in Manhattan before landing a job there was a reporter and freelance journalist.

While writing a story publicizing the Society of Independent Artists he met a fascinating group of New York painters and immediately enmeshed himself in the city’s visual arts culture. In 1922, Cahill joined the staff of the Newark Museum, making a name for himself as a curator of American folk art, and by 1932 he was the acting director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA.) Because of Cahill’s growing reputation, he was appointed the first director of the Federal Art Project (FAP) in the summer of 1935. In 1923, László Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty of the Bauhaus and resigned in 1928 under the mounting political debate within the school. In 1937, MoholyNagy traveled to Chicago at the invitation of the Association of Arts and Industries, where he established the New Bauhaus in the former Marshall Field mansion.

above // Edith Heath, undated photo opposite // Brian Heath, undated photo

24 Heath Ceramics

The school folded after only one year, but Moholy-Nagy, with the help of other faculty members, immediately created the more successful Chicago School of Design. The school was renamed the Institute of Design and eventually merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology. Moholy-Nagy and Cahill were introduced to one another by the small contingent of art historians and social elites who championed the work of the federal government in the arts.

At the FAP training school in Batavia, Cahill, Moholy-Nagy, teachers, and artists gathered to share creative energy, engage in lengthy discussions on culture and social progress. For Edith, being able to teach here brought with it great opportunity. She soaked up ideas from leading artists and intellectuals and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

"THE INFLUENCE WAS IN KNOWING THAT THERE WAS, AND IS, A COMMUNITY OF CREATIVE PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD WHO LISTEN TO THE SAME DRUMMER AND THAT I AM NOT ALONE IN MY WAY OF SEEING AND HEARING AND BEING,” she reflected in her 1995 oral history that was coordinated by the University of California at Berkeley. More significant, in May of 1938, Edith met Brian Heath, the camp director and two years her junior. Edith and Brian were drawn to each other immediately, as opposites often are.

Edith was fascinated by Brian’s bohemian roots and liberal idealism. He had lived in Guatemala as a small child until an earthquake forced his single mother to relocate to Greenwich Village, New York where she typed manuscripts for the city’s authors. From New York, he moved to San Diego, where his mother remarried and helped establish a new writers’ colony.

25 Chapter 1

"THE INFLUENCE WAS IN KNOWING THAT THERE WAS, AND IS, A COMMUNITY OF CREATIVE PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD WHO LISTEN TO THE SAME DRUMMER AND THAT I AM NOT ALONE IN MY WAY OF SEEING AND HEARING AND BEING.” — EDITH HEATH, University of California at Berkley Speech, 1995

opposite // Edith Heath arranging dinnerware in the factory showroom, 1960

26 Heath Ceramics

27 Chapter 1

28 Heath Ceramics

COMPLEMENTING HIS ROLE AT THE FEDERAL ART PROJECT, Brain was also a master’s candidate at the University of Chicago, where he was studying social service administration.

Just three short months after they met, Edith and Brian were married in an informal ceremony in front of the large fireplace at the Howell Neighborhood House. They celebrated at a Hungarian restaurant, where they spent the evening folk dancing. After their marriage, Edith continued to teach and take art courses, even studying with Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design, until Brian received his degree in 1941. After his graduation, Brian accepted a job in San Francisco as the regional director for the American Red Cross.

Driving from Chicago to San Francisco, Brian and Edith took their time to see the country. Stopping in New Mexico, Edith was awed by the traditional black-on-black ceramics of Maria Martinez, one of the most influential and famous Native American potters who is still revered for both the beauty of her work and the new techniques and finishes she applied to an age-old native craft technique. Years later, Edith would be quoted in a newspaper article saying,

"WE VISITED A PUEBLO AND I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE CERAMIC WORK OF MARIA MARTINEZ. ALTHOUGH I HAD LITTLE TRAINING IN CERAMICS, I DECIDED THEN, ‘THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO.’” Back in San Francisco, Edith accepted a position as an art teacher at the Presidio Hill School, one of California’s oldest independent schools and one that also subscribed to John Dewey’s progressive philosophies. Edith audited classes at the California School of Fine Arts (known today as the San Francisco Art Institute), where she chose subjects that met her wide range of interests, including a ceramics course. But with twenty students, and only two pottery wheels at the school, her access to ceramics equipment was limited so Edith took matters into her own hands. She purchased an ole treadle-powered sewing machine, and Brian, in an early display of engineering prowess, converted it into a wheel. Edith was then able to practice her craft more regularly, but she was still left unfulfilled. She told her professor that she wasn’t learning enough about the complicated science of ceramics and eventually dropped the course.

opposite // Edith Heath working with clay, undated photo

29 Chapter 1

EDITH PETITIONED THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA at Berkley’s extension program to host a year-long intensive course on ceramic chemistry. When the university responded favorably, Edith, as well as Brian and several other students, began studying with chemist Dr. Willie Kahn.

Edith was filled with a consuming passion for what she was learning and converted the basement laundry room below their Filbert Street flat into a ceramic studio. A large gas-fired kiln soon joined the treadle-powered pottery wheel. Getting it into the basement wasn’t easy and required the help of several people. They had to slowly lower the heavy furnace down one of the city’s steepest streets with a rope before safely maneuvering it into the basement.

Edith placed a second smaller kiln on her kitchen counter. Here she ran a wide variety of clay and glaze tests. These were incredibly valuable in helping Edith understand the seemingly endless variations that resulted from chemical combinations occurring on a molecular level in the practice of ceramics. In the process, she learned that the type of clay she used had a big impact on the aesthetic quality of her ware. Premixed, commercial clays were, in her estimations, “gutless,” so Edith and Brian cast a wider net and spent weekends motoring throughout Northern California to clay pits and brickyards. In these formative years Edith’s favorite place to obtain material was the town of Lincoln, near Sacramento, where a prehistoric inland sea had left vast clay deposits. Edith collected random samples and brought them back to her San Francisco flat for testing.

Edith knew that different clays came with unique properties that affected their color, plasticity (stickiness), and workability and, in the case of firing, their porosity, shrinkage, thermal-shock resistance, and speck development. The burgeoning chemist set about concocting an exemplary clay body, a term that refers to the more holistic and final clay mixture used by studio potters. Her goal was to formulate a vitreous clay body that was derived from locally sourced materials and was reflective of the Northern California environment where it had been originally formed. Most of all, Edith wanted to create something that no one had used before. She added silica to provide strength and reduce the plasticity of her naturally occurring clays and added feldspar, a glass former (or fluxing agent) that lowered the melting temperature of the overall mix.

top // Edith Heath working with clay, undated photo opposite // Edith's early ceramicware included handmade slab pieces like this water pitcher and mug set. The textured surface on this collection was created with burlap fabric.

30 Heath Ceramics

31 Chapter 1

EDITH'S CONVICTION THAT THE STRUCTURAL MATERIALS of her ceramics were expressive in a larger creative context correlated with the principles of the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movements.

A reaction to Victorian design principles, which were based on heavy ornamentation, and the negative social changes brought about by the machine ago, the Arts and Crafts movement promoted the use of natural, local materials and small, unadorned sentiments, like leaving surfaces unpainted to expose the wood’s inherent luster.

Experimenting with naturally occurring, raw chemical compounds, Edith moved closer to perfecting a stoneware clay body that maintained its strength and a low absorption rate. Both were key to creating quality dinnerware and most people achieved this through high fire temperatures.

To obtain the same results under lower temperatures was tricky and could result in porous ware. On the other hand, firing with lower temperatures was an easy way for a keen wartime ceramicist, like Edith, to save money running a fuel-hungry kiln. Her early glazes were composed of oxides that interacted with one another which was Edith’s gift. She formulated glazes that combined with her clay body under the heat of the kiln to leave a distinctive speckle pattern that became a hallmark of her early ware. This “melting through” effect resulted from high concentrations of active oxides like manganese in the clay fusing with equally active oxides in the glaze. Edith made the conscious choice to expose her clay body in subtle but obvious gestures. From using transparent crystalline glazes over clays colored with chemical additives to simply wiping clean the rims of her ware, the burgeoning studio potter reinforced the value she placed on materiality and the lessons of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Extermination and variation were all part of the wonderful game, one that Edith enjoyed playing and in which outcomes were often speculative. She would eventually settle on a multipurpose clay formula that incorporated Lincoln clay, was earthy and dark brown in color, and met her stringent clay requirements. Form also played an important role in Edith’s work.

Beyond her obvious attraction to the science of her craft was her search for useful shapes that appealed to her modern sensibilities. Her pottery was a balance of hand-built and hand-thrown work, from small teacups and mugs to larger vases, plates, and water pitchers. The pieces tended more toward simplicity, a characteristic that followed Edith and her work throughout her career. opposite // In her Clay Street studio, Edith's glazes were measured, mixed, and applied by hand

32 Heath Ceramics

33 Introduction

34 Heath Ceramics

BY THE SPRING OF 1944, still working at the Presidio Hill School, Edith had also started teaching nigh classes in ceramics at the well-regarded and popular art department of the California Labor School, which initially focused on Marxist ideologies and labor leadership under the support of the Communist Party of the United States. The Labor School’s pro-American and anti-Fascist stance garnered it substantial support from unions and government agencies during World War II. When the war ended and the tide of anticommunist sentiment began to swell, enrollment and finances suffered, eventually forcing the Labor School to close. Edith was by no means a communist, but she did share with Brian a lifelong interest in supporting working men and women.

Also that spring Carolyn Williams, one of the few private students Edith taught out of her home studio, hinted that Edith should show her work to some of San Francisco’s galleries. Edith brushed off the suggestion, but when one of William’s friends, a merchandise buyer for a large New York retailer, arrived in town, Edith was persuaded to meet with her at the St. Francis Hotel. Edith packed up a selection of pottery and, together with Williams, paid a visit to the buyer. Nothing came of the meeting, but afterward, the pair stopped by the Bronstein Gallery, just across from the hotel. By coincidence, Jermayne MacAgy, the acting director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum (now part of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco), was visiting the gallery.

Williams pressed Edith into showing MacAgy her work. The acting director was very impressed and immediately offered Edith an invitation to exhibit at the museum. In subsequent conversations they agreed to mount a show that would open in the fall, giving Edith three months to complete the two hundred pieces to be included in the final museum display. Diving headfirst into production Edith focused on salad sets, bowls, and tea services who recurring shapes eased the burden of attempting such a monumental task. She also made square plates, vases, candleholders, a beer jug with matching mugs, a water pitcher, a decanter, a cigarette box, and a teapot.

The exhibition opened on September 1, 1944, and ran for one month.

Attending the show was Bill Brewer, a large buyer from the venerable San Francisco retailer Gump’s, which opened in 1861 under the watchful eye of Solomon Gump and was renowned on the West Coast as the known purveyor of good taste and resource for exclusive decorative arts.

opposite // Historic photo of clay being mixed at Heath Ceramics

35 Chapter 1

Brewer’s visit was part of an ongoing search for high-quality American crafts, since the popular European and Asian items that had given the store its upscale reputation were not available during the war. Brewer contacted Edith Heath and asked if he could cosign the contents of her exhibition. She agreed, and when the show closed, her work became a successful addition to Gump’s showroom.

However, onetime arrangements like these were not enough to keep the store well stocked and to solve this problem Brewer had been working with regional artists to set up small workshops that could supply the store on a regular basis.

To ensure their supply of ceramics, Gump’s sponsored a ceramics workshop at 565 Clay Street in downtown San Francisco, but it wasn’t providing the store with high-quality ware. Brewer suggested Edith take over the operation and supply him with her hand-thrown pottery.

36 Heath Ceramics

In a unique arrangement, the store offered Edith all the equipment she would need for production, a reduced rent of only $50 a month, and very few strings attached. Brewer encouraged her to make dinnerware sets, and, with regard to individual pieces like vases and pitchers, he advised, “Whatever you make, make three of them.” She excitedly took on the challenge and two weeks later was preparing to fill and deliver her first order.

To meet Gump’s increasing demand for her work, she had to quit her beloved teaching positions. She hired two of her best students from the Labor School, Pearl Drob Jackson and Nikki Harimake, to throw ware to her exacting specifications. She also employed a wounded veteran, recently discharged from the army, to prepare and edge clay for the three busy potters.

WHEN THE WAR ENDED IN THE SUMMER OF 1945, and his work with the Red Cross became less critical, Brian gave up social work in favor of a professional partnership with Edith and full-time work at the emergent ceramics studio. Brian quickly filled the role of business manager, accountant, shipping clerk, and chief inventor.

As he had done with the treadle-powered pottery wheel he’d made a few years earlier, Brian solved early production problems with great skill.

One of his first remedies was to replace Edith’s process for mixing clay, which had consisted of rolling sealed drums along the floor, with a more dependable and consistent hand-cranked churn that he built from scratch.

Gump’s extended their support by sending buyers from other retailers to Edith’s studio. Neiman Marcus, Marshall Field’s, Bullock’s, and San Francisco’s venerable City of Paris department store liked what they saw and ordered dinnerware sets. Small retailers devoted to handcraft also included Edith in their sales mix. One of these, and perhaps the most important, was American House, a New York City retia gallery established

by Mrs. Aileen Osborn Webb. Married to Vanderbilt Webb, a descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs. Webb embraced American crafts, an interest that blossomed during the Depression and led her to establish the American Craftsman’s Cooperative Council in 1939 and the America House a year later. She appointed Frances Wright as the director of the America House, and it was likely Frances who first suggested Edith’s work to her father, Frank Lloyd Wright, who in turn would go on to specify Heath as the dinnerware of choice for his multidimensional projects.

Expansion into a new retail setting was followed by more good luck in early 1946. Adolph Shuman, the president of the Manufacturer’s and Wholesaler’s Association of San Francisco and owner of the Lilli Ann line of clothing — the epitome of West Coast glamour at the time — invited ten artists to exhibit their work at the San Francisco Gift, Toy, and Houseware Show, held at the Whitcomb Hotel. It was the first San Francisco gift show following the war and the first to include arts and crafts. Shuman, by inviting Edith and other artists, hoped to entice buyers to come to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, where the pull was stronger. Just before the show officially opened, Nelson Gustin, owner of N.S. Gustin Company, a distributor of ceramics and other retail items, visited Edith on the advice of his son Jay, who had recently returned to the family business after his army service.

top // Museum brochure announcing the exhibition schedule for September 1944 opposite // Heath employee forming a plate in the 1950s on a manual jigger machine

37 Chapter 1

JAY WAS TIRED OF THE KNICKKNACKS the business was distributing and wanted to represent high-quality merchandise. Like Bill Brewer at Gump’s. Nelson Gustin suffered from a lack of imports and was instantly taken by Edith’s skill.

He tried to buy her entire collection on the spot.

Edith, sensing that he might be bluffing and still in the midst of setting up her display, suggested that Gustin return when the gift show officially opened the next day.

Offended by her apparent lack of interest, Gustin waited almost four months before finally reconnecting with Edith to discuss a distribution agreement, He offered to represent her work nationwide with a plan to identify at least one retailer in every major city.

While Edith was interested, she told the distributor that her small studio would not be able to produce enough volume to satisfy so many stores. Nelson Gustin proposed to help them expand their operation by cosigning a bank loan with the Heaths in the amount of $10,000 and guaranteeing to purchase her first year’s production output. In return, he would become the exclusive distributor for her ceramics and their agreement would transform the small studio into an enduring production facility and establish Edith as one of America’s most treasured ceramicists. With a small push from Nelson Gustin’s helping hand, Heath Ceramics was born.

The Clay Street studio wasn’t large enough to support the revised production targets, so Brian began looking for a new factory space across the bay in the picturesque town of Sausalito. Always known for a strong art community, Sausalito had

38 Heath Ceramics

been radically transformed by the Bechtel Corporation into a new shipbuilding powerhouse in March 1942. At its busiest, the Marinship yards employed over twenty thousand people supporting the war effort. In three and a half years, ninety-three ships were launched, including many cargo vessels affectionately dubbed “liberty ships.” When the war ended the shipyards were all but abandoned and the land put up for sale. The hordes of shipyard workers also disappeared, leaving Sausalito and its now abundant and affordable space to artists and craftspeople once again. Brian found a good-sized rental on the top floor of the Mason Building (eventually renamed the Village Fair Building.)

Built in 1924, it had originally provided parking for passengers using the ferry that ran between Sausalito and San Francisco. With the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, ferry traffic fell off and the building was renovated as warehouse space. For $300 a month Brian rented an open loft that had been recently occupied by pattern makers from the shipbuilding industry. A year later, in 1947, the Heaths purchased a piece of land in the former Marinship years with the foresight that they would eventually expand beyond the Mason Building. The transition to a new production facility marked a slight shift away from Edith’s purely handmade ware. Up until the move each piece was formed on a wheel to match her original design. Now, with so many orders, there was no choice but to integrate new equipment that would help the young company meet its production goals. Brian purchased and installed four new kilns as well as a pug mill and filter press for clay making.

Racks of empty jigger molds and others filled with drying ware compete for space in this photo of the Mason Building factory, taken in the mid-1950s.

39 Chapter 1

40 Heath Ceramics

ADDING TO HEATHS GROWING COLLECTION OF NEW, USED, AND HANDMADE MACHINERY, Brian also designed and built jigger wheels, one of the earlier industrial applications to be adopted by the ceramics industry. Jigger wheels allowed ceramic flatware such as plates and shallow bowls to be formed quickly on plaster molds. In the jigger application, a bat of clay is placed onto a spinning mold, which shapes the inside of the ware; a metal profile attached to a lever arm is pulled down by a “jiggerman” to form the outer face and foot (base.)

While the jigger wheel meant substantial production increases, it did present some challenges for Edith. Pieces formed over molds had to be designed with removal from the plaster in mind, a dilemma that forced Edith to simplify some of her designs. She used her hand-thrown ware are prototypes for the shapes that were perfected on the jigger wheel, and in many cases the changes were imperceptible. For intricate shapes that couldn’t be made on the jigger wheel, the Heaths turned to slip casting.

In this method, slip, a mixture of clay and water, is poured into a hollow plaster mold. The slip remains in the mold for a specified time and is them poured out. This leaves a thin wall of clay along the inside surface of the mold. The plaster mold continues to absorb excess ware from the remaining slip during the drying process. Both jiggering and slip casting added the job of mold making to the expanding list of Heath Ceramics factory operations. Edith personally trained each of their now ten employees in her handmade and jigger-assisted production process.

The company produced a six-piece place setting that included a dinner plate, salad plate, bread plate, cup, saucer, and bowl. They also produced two serving bowls, a creamer and sugar set, salt and pepper shakers, and a platter. Workers came mostly from the ranks of willing artists and craftspeople in the Sausalito community but also included a young couple, recent graduates of Alfred University’s ceramics program, who had traveled across the country to work at Heath. Edith’s first official dinnerware line was perfected in 1947 and named Coupe. It was an instant hit, prized by many for the way it married modern, clean lines to a craft-based heritage that accentuated the importance of clay and glaze. Original colors included sand, sage, blue, aqua, and apricot. Gunmetal, green luster, sand and sea, and brownstone followed soon after. By 1949 Heath Ceramics was producing one hundred thousand pieces of ware a year and grossing $5,000 a month. opposite // Multiple drying racks inside of Heath Ceramics

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ALTHOUGH PRODUCTION HAD MOVED ACROSS THE BAY, Edith and Brian still commuted to Sausalito from their San Francisco home. One of their employee suggested that they consider building a houseboat and encouraged them to take a look at a barge moored at the former Marinship yards. Houseboats had been tucked along the Sausalito waterfront for many years, but it wasn’t until the shipyard closed and a collection of surplus boats, barges, and ferries were bought, sold, and retrofitted that California houseboat living gained its much larger reputation.

At the time there weren’t many restrictions on the homes and no marina existed to collect fees and give order to the floating community.

Edith and Brian visited the barge, an old potato hauler named the Dorothea. It was one hundred feet long by twenty-four feet wide, about the size of a small lot in town. The price was a very reasonable $3,000. The Heaths went ahead and purchased it, contracting one of their studio managers, a young architectural student named Eral Leek, to design and build a house on the barge, which the Heaths would initially share with the Leeks. For building materials, they salvaged lumber from piles of abandoned timber and plywood left by the shipbuilding industry.

Houseboat living appealed to Edith, who was quickly reminded of her familial Danish fishing roots. Both Brian and Edith enjoyed the mix of bohemian decadence and innate creativity that defined the houseboat culture. Their neighbors were mostly artists and writers, including the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts and painter and local character Jean Varda.

But after they had lived on the barge for only three short years (from 1949 to 1951), the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, together with the Sausalito city council, began pressing houseboats to confirm to new environmental standards.

The Heaths recognized that the disappointing and inevitable solution would be an expensive one. Instead of biding their time, Brian and Edith purchased four acres of waterfront property in the nearby town of Tiburon. Without proper permits, (Edith was notorious for eschewing standard protocols), they bulldozed the steep hillside property to provide access to the beach and create a series of stepped patio and entertaining areas. After they floated the Dorothea across a small bay and up against their property, a house mover helped them bring the barge onto dry land and raise it up just off the beach.

They added a wraparound porch, outbuildings, and landscaping, which gave the Dorothea a more conventional and permanent look. Winnie Crittenden, Brian’s niece and longtime Heath Ceramics employee, remembers,

"I USED TO PLAY AROUND THE SURREAL, OVERSIZED PROPELLER THAT JUTTED OUT FROM THE BASE OF THE HOUSE. IT JUST LODGED IN THE SANDY BEACH BELOW.” Meanwhile, Edith added several new pieces to her product line, expanded factory capacity, and enhanced her reputation. She released a punch bowl, a large salad bowl, a pouring bowl with handle, an oversized buffet plate, and casseroles in five different sizes. The Heath teapot, coffeepot, water pitcher, and studio mugs all added to Edith’s rising star.

opposite // N.S. Gustin Company Advertisement for Heath Dinnerware, 1947

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MEANWHILE, N.S. GUSTIN INCREASED THEIR DISTRIBUTION by striking deals with more East Coast retailers, including the original Pottery Barn and Bloomingdale’s in New York.

The appreciation and recognition of both peers and design professionals followed.

In California, Edith exhibited and won awards for her ware at the De Young Museum, Mills College Museum, the State Fair, the San Diego Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Commission Festivals.

Edith’s work was exhibited nationally at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Akron Art Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the University of Nebraska.

Edith's transition from studio potter to industrial designer was not without controversy, she had been a founding member and president of the nascent Association of San Franciscan Potters, an organization dedicated to exhibiting regional ware. But when she added productiondriven devices like the jigger wheel, some of the members of the association began to question whether Edith should still be included in the group’s activities.

The growing rift wasn’t a big concern for Edith, who dropped out of the association, never having considered herself much of a joiner. America House, dedicated to the singular hand of the craftsman, had a reaction similar as the Association of San Francisco Potters. Frances Wright chose to bar Heath Ceramics from the America House’s retail gallery, going so far as to say that she “selling out.” Edith was in a very unique

opposite // Trimmers cut away the excess clay that often remains on pieces after their initial production

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position — she had one foot in each of the two worlds, that of the craftsperson and that of the industrial designer. Nevertheless, she remained dedicated to form and was grounded in science and experience. Enjoying her hybrid role, Edith continued to use her pottery wheel to create new shapes. However, she considered making ware solely on a wheel to be an anachronism in a busy modern society. Knowing that a machine was only programmed to reflect her intent, she said in her oral history,

"GOOD DESIGN DOESN’T DEPEND ON WHETHER AN OBJECT IS MADE

BY HAND.” Edith’s views on the arts, modern technology, and mass production can be traced back to the Bauhaus and the brief but important influence of László Moholy-Nagy. In 1919, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder, emphasized artistic unity, technical handcraft over artistry, and knowledge of materiality, proclaiming in his manifesto, “Architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to crafts!” But reaching their state utopian objective to design the legendary “new building of the future” with its inherent unifying themes was a struggle.

Three years later Gropius would modify his ideas to reflect growing industrialization and change the school’s motto to “art and technology — a new unity.” Stressing industrial potential by encouraging the design of prototypes for mass production. Leaders in the design field had predicted a mechanical future in which welldesigned products would be available to a mass market ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Hull House address.

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IN THIS REGARD, the mid-twentieth century was a time of progress in American. The postwar boom was feeding a strong economy and throughout the country people were decorating increasingly modern homes with contemporary furniture, appliances, and household goods.

Edith often recognized that families were often forced to choose between cheap dinnerware that broke or chipped easily and fine European china that reflected an aristocratic and conservative style — a style that didn’t mesh with her own concepts of modern living. She noted that her easy, soft shapes owed more to folk dancing than to ballet. Her design principles extended beyond individual pieces to accentuate relationships between items in a table setting, which might be concentrically stacked or arranged to play off one another. She strived to balance two ends of the spectrum by retaining her ware’s durability and affordability while demanding a level of quality and appearance that would be accepted as a family’s Sunday best. Beyond Bauhaus influences, her work was quintessentially American, not only in its material roots but also in the way it reflected less-disciplined attitudes and more relaxed living. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., curator of industrial design at MoMA in New York, agreed.

Kaufmann was an early champion of Heath Ceramics. His entrée into the world of architecture and design began in 1934, when he joined Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, a membership organization for young apprentices at Taliesin’s fully accredited architecture studies program.

He lasted in the program only six months before returning to Pittsburg and his family’s innovative and design-wise Kaufmann’s Department Store.

He immediately encouraged his father to work with Wright on an Appalachian vacation home, and by 1936 construction of Fallingwater, just outside of Mill Run, Pennsylvania, had begun.

Kaufmann’s over twenty-year relationship with MoMA started when he hosted one of the museum’s home furnishings exhibitions at the family department store. This was followed by several small curatorial projects that led to his appointment, in 1946 to the position of director of MoMA’s industrial design department.

Kaufmann’s most important professional contribution, outside of his authority on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, were the Good Design exhibitions he coordinated with the Chicago Merchandise Mart between 1950 and 1955.

These exhibitions displayed and promoted design ideals in all facets of furniture and household products. Edith first met Edgar Kaufmann Jr. while still working at the Clay Street studio.

He appreciated Edith’s innovative style and found that the work helped to define his nascent precepts on modern design, which would eventually be published in his 1950 book, What is Modern Design. In it he stipulated, “Modern design should express the qualities and beauty of the materials used.” He immediately began selling Edith’s ware at the family store and later, in 1948, as MoMA curator accessioned two of Edith’s hand-thrown bowl into the museum’s permanent collection, adding a full six-piece place setting and teapot soon after.

For the inaugural Good Design exhibition in 1950, Kaufmann and a selection committee (which included architect Alexander Girard and curator Meyric Rogers) chose a Heath casserole and water pitcher for exhibition in Chicago and New York. Kaufman would spent more time with Edith in the early 1950s, when the two were asked to serve as jurors for the third annual Northwest Ceramics Exhibition in Portland, Oregon. Kaufmann arrived in San Francisco and together they drove north in the Heaths’ brandnew convertible Nash Rambler.

opposite // Excess slip is poured out after a thin wall of clay adheres to the inside of the mold

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WHILE MAKING THEIR WAY THROUGH CALIFORNIA, they talked about all things design. During the drive Kaufmann presciently described Edith and her work as a true classic, a comment she wasn’t prepared to accept given the shore tenure of her career thus far.

Kaufmann would again include Heath in a Good Design exhibition and in a 1957 exhibition of American manufacturers that toured Europe under the auspices of the U.S. State Department.

The show was loosely based on a book by Don Wallace, titled Shaping America’s Products, and included a selection of the company’s ceramics along with photographic blowups of their production techniques.

One of Heath Ceramics’ most popular pieces, and a true classic, that gained them great notoriety was, of all things, their ashtray. Both Brian and Edith smoked heavily. Brian, in the course of running daily operations, found that he had trouble simultaneously talking on the phone, taking notes, and smoking; if he put his cigarette down on the design it would leave burn marks or snuff the cigarette altogether. Ordinary ashtrays were barely adequate and Brian’s cigarettes would often fall out, again burning the desk, or fall in, getting sullied by the other butts. Brain, ever the engineer, had a vision for a better ashtray.

Picking up a clay bowl off the drying rack, he cut a series of V-shaped notches into its side. The narrowing of the notch pinched the cigarettes and held them in place. Another benefit was that any cigarette placed in one of Brian’s ashtrays would self-extinguish when it burned down to the tapered ceramic slot, the pinch adding the perfect amount of condensation and cutting off just enough oxygen to kill the glowing ember.

opposite // N.S. Gustin Company Advertisement for Heath Ashtrays

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Brian build a pedal-powered contraption that used pieces of bent tin to punch regular notches into the ashtrays. Edith added her own aesthetic touch, but the ashtray was known within the factory as the one piece that Brian designed.

The ashtray was added to the product line, and suddenly the factory started receiving a substantial number of orders. Edith called Nelson Gustin, their distributor, and inquired about the reason for the new interest. Gustin told her that with the ashtray’s heavy weight, and its ability to extinguish a forgotten butt, had motivated the fire marshal in the city of Seattle to name them “safety ashtrays” and require them to be installed in every public building in the city.

Their use in office environments became widespread; General Electric became Heath’s largest ashtray client, with a version that included the company’s logo in the center of the tray.

Often used in photo shoots for architecture and home magazines, they also became very popular wedding and housewarming gifts. At one point ashtrays represented 25 percent of Heath Ceramics’ business.

The 1950s were heady days for the company.

They continued to receive accolades for their dinnerware, and from museum exhibitions to increasing sales, things were going well.

Edith and Brian took time each summer, starting in 1951, to attend the Aspen Design Conference (founded by Walter Paepcke, an early financial supporter of Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus), where Edith complemented her own design philosophy with that of other admired and well respected professionals. Edith and Brian were invited to present their work at one conference

50 Heath Ceramics

and over the forty years that they attended, Brian served as both a moderator and a member of the conference committee. Edith began teaching again, this time as head of the ceramics department at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

Edith pressed all of her students — and one of who would become the famed ceramic artist Robert Arneson — to learn ceramic chemistry, as she had done. To help them understand the complexities of the craft she led them through a rigorous series of clay and glaze tests. Arneson remembered the experience with humor and honesty. Additionally, Edith hosted an important ceramics conference in 1956 at the school with speakers including the now legendary Hungarian industrial designer Eva Zeisel, ceramic artists Peter Voulkos and Tony Prieto, and Marguerite Wildenhain, who ran Pond Farm, the ceramics-focused summer school in Sonoma County, California.

"WE MUST HAVE MADE ONE HUNDRED DIFFERENT CLAY BODIES AND SHRINKAGE TESTS AND ALL THESE ABSORPTIONS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT, BUT I WAS LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT CLAYS.” The 1950s were also the decade when Heath Ceramics finally grew too large for its top-floor production space in the Mason Building. Having had the good sense to purchase a piece of property in the Marinship yards a decade earlier, Edith and Brian began planning a new factory.

In 1958 they commissioned the San Francisco architecture firm of Marquis and Stoller to design the building. Edith helped the architects devise a floor plan that would provide proper flow as pieces moved through the building from station to station. She pinned small scraps of paper to her own drawings to find the best location for each piece of equipment and determine how much space was needed to accommodate the numerous carts that rolled ware through the factory. Claude Stoller (whose brother was the architectural photographer Ezra Stoller) and his partner Robert Marquis worked closely with the Heaths to find a modern design solution that would produce the open and adaptable floor plan that Edith desired.

They organized their single-story plan around the central courtyard, providing the building, with its hot kilns, plenty of cross-ventilation. To create open spaces devoid of pesky interior support posts, the architects introduced Trofdek framing, a prefabricated roofing system in its American debut. The unique troughs that gave the construction system its name were constructed from plywood and two-by-six lumber that could bridge a fifty-foot span with only a half inch of sag. With prefab roofing sections arriving on the construction site in long lengths and four-foot widths.

Installation was quick, efficient, and economical. opposite // Completed in 1960, the new Heath factory in the former Marinship yards featured prefabricated architectural elements, making the building a model for cost and efficiency.

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Excluding fees, the cost at the time was a mere six dollars per square foot for a fifteen-thousand square foot factory. By the end of 1960, Heath Ceramics had completed an amazing seamless move into the new building without losing one day of production.

But shifts in the market were inevitable, and the 1960s represented a new economic and cultural challenge for the company. By then, a good fifteen years after the end of World War II, European and Asian countries were once again flooding the American market with imports, many of them low-cost. Heath Ceramics was now competing against a variety of dinnerware manufacturers from abroad. Their reorder business (to replace broken pieces from existing dinnerware sets) and sales at its new on-site factory store helped the bottom line. Still, Edith looked for new ways to sustain and expand the business.

When a Marin County couple approached Edith and asked if she would make a specialized flood tile for their home she initially told them the factory wasn’t set up to make tile. However, eventually finding the challenge irresistible, Edith agreed to create something for them. She modified a jigger machine, creating six-by-six inch square that were textured with a steel brush and glazed. The couple liked the results and happily installed the tiles. Since the project was a success, Edith decided to investigate the most effective ways to make tile in the factory. Jiggering wasn’t an option because the machines were need to make plates. She let the idea simmer until she hired Leon Galleto, a French ceramicist who was able to give tile operations a boost. Galleto had studied in Strasbourg and had spent years

opposite // An employee cuts notches into an ashtray with one of Brian's pedal-powered contraptions

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designing ware for Saxbo, a respected Danish pottery maker. Galleto created a series of shaped tiles for Heath Ceramics that had to be individually cast. They included triangles, diamonds, bowties, and a beautiful rectangular shape with a raised oval profile. But casting was tedious and too time-intensive, especially for the more traditional rectangular tiles. Again, Brian helped solve the problem. He built what they called a “ribbon machine,” which ingeniously used the wringer from a washing machine. An operator would feed clay through the wringer, which in turn gave the clay the appropriate thickness and texture. A series of trimming wires set the width of the tile at three inches, and lengths were cut into modules three, six, nine, or twelve inches long. The ribbon machine could produce fifty square feet of unfinished tile in an hour. Each project could be further individualized, since Edith offered to work with architects and interior designers to test and match glaze colors for each installation.

Word about the quality and flexibility of the Heaths’ tile production began to spread through the architectural community. In 1962, architect William Pereira asked Heath Ceramics to product twelve-by-twelve-inch floor tiles for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Although Brian and Edith didn’t have available kiln space or a hydraulic ram press, the most efficient tool for such a large order, they accepted the job.

However, to overcome these hurdles they outsourced production, specifying Edith’s formulas for clay and glaze, to Design Craft, an underutilized ceramics factory in Los Angeles owned by the N.S. Gustin Company.

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THE PRODUCTION AND INSTALLATION FOR THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM went smoothly and the Heaths’ list of architectural clients expanded. Pereira used Heath tile for additional projects, as did other well-known architects, like Eero Saarinen (John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois), Alexander Girard (L’Etoile Restaurant in New York), Kevin Roche (Ford Foundation in New York), and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii.)

The most famous of the Heath tile installations was completed for the exterior walls of the Pasadena Art Museum, designed by the architecture firm Ladd and Kelsey. The building, known today as the Norton Simon Museum of Art, is easily identifiable by the serpentine walls that curve and bend at graceful, but never perpendicular, angles. When Ladd and Kelsey contacted Heath Ceramics in 1966 they originally wanted to skin the walls with four-by-four-inch imitation stone tiles. Edith tried making these but felt that they looked fake and told the architects as much. Ladd and Kelsey came back to her asking for something that was evocative of the tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian (also known as the Castel Sant’Angelo.) Edith experimented with a selection of dynamic glazes, using one atop the other, each with a different melting temperature. One glaze bubbled up through the next, giving the tiles an eruptive or volcanic quality. The architects liked the results but pressed Edith to work further on the color.

She settled on an onyx glaze under brick red, the final color echoing that of both Hadrian’s tomb ad the reddish brown backdrop of the Pasadena’s San Gabriel Mountains. Completed in 1969, the building was praised by the design community, its curvaceous tile skin the focus of much positive attention. The building went on to win the Ceramic Tile Institute’s Master’s Award for exterior construction and the Institute’s Perpetual Trophy, which identified the most outstanding project in Southern California. Two years later, Edith was awarded the Industrial Arts Medal by the American Institute of Architects. The award, part of an annual program drawing attention to individuals making significant contributions to preserving, depicting, or creating beauty, culminated in an exhibition of Edith’s work at the Octagon in Washington, D.C.

opposite // Pumpkin and Brown Ashtray from the 1960s

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THE EXCITING DEVELOPMENT OF HEATH CERAMICS TILE BUSINESS during the 1960s was just one extension of the Heath name. Edith Heath was both creative and restless, always looking for new opportunities so when Arthur Bryan, the managing director of the centuriesold Wedgwood ceramics company, invited her to collaborate on a line of dinnerware she found it to be both an honor and a prospect. Bryan had first seen Edith’s designs while selling Wedgwood in the United States, and when he took over the operations in England he promptly contacted the Heaths. Edith wanted to get her ware into the European market, but high tariffs protecting local industries made that nearly impossible.

In June 1965, Edith and Brian left their company in the capable hands of their staff and arrived at the historic Wedgwood factories in Stoke-onTrent. During an extended stay in England, Edith began producing a limited run of dinnerware and associated pieces, such as her coffeepot, under the name Heath of California for Wedgwood. She overcame the challenge of working with different equipment and clay formulas and in nine months had created three thousand pieces of ware. They were almost identical in shape to her original designs but had been glazed with an eye for market differences. Bryan started a month-long market research campaign, but the results were not promising. Knowing how long it can take to win over an audience, Edith insisted that he hadn’t given it enough time. Even though Wedgwood ended their collaboration with the Heaths, the experiences was a very important stamp of approval for Edith Heath and increased international interest in her uniquely American design vocabulary.

opposite // Heath's Rim Line bowls

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The Heaths returned home, but not before Brian asked for one of Wedgwood’s old roller jiggers, which was slated to be junked. Once it arrived in California, he adeptly retrofitted it for use in the Heath factory. The roller jigger, an automated version of the traditional jigger, used hydraulics to force a profile onto a spinning mold that was loaded with a bat of clay. The roller jigger not only shapes the ware but also trims the edges in a faction of the time it would take to handjigger a piece. Adding the roller jigger to Heath Ceramics’ daily production line allowed a welltrained jiggerman to increase production by a few hundred pieces a day.

Comfortably ensconced in her California factory, Edith focused on marketing a modified version of her original Coupe line. A thicker rim and small changes to her cups and bowls gave the pieces added strength and a new look. The thick rim also made stacking easy and safe. This second line of dinnerware was originally called Gourmet but later renamed the Rim line. Sales of the new line remained sluggish, with only a handful of devotees. In 1971, Don Olsen, a local architect and friend of the Heaths, approached Edith with plans for a new chain of restaurants, the first of which was to be built in Sausalito. He asked Edith to provide a sample place setting for the restaurant owners to consider. Victoria Station, the railroad-themed chain specializing in prime rib, chose the Rim line. The chain expanded throughout the 1970s to include more than one hundred restaurants around the United States and Canada, recognizable by the boxcars and cabooses that served as dining areas. Given that each restaurant featured Heath Ceramics, it represented a huge account for the company.

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THE POPULARITY OF THE HEATH LINE WAS CONTAGIOUS, leading to orders from more chains and individual restaurants whose owners truly appreciated the functionality of the ware. The demand became so great that Edith and Brian had to find yet another outsourcing partner, again in Los Angeles, to help fill the highvolume order. The Rim line soon became the fastest growing and most profitable business arm and remained so for a good ten years.

The financial success of the Rim line helped the company afford to bring tile production back to the Sausalito factory from Design Craft, which had become very busy and requested of Heath that contract tile operations be discontinued.

They hired Don Olsen to design and build a twostory addition to the original building, which as finished in 1973. Brian’s ribbon machine was replaced by two ram presses and complemented by a set of dies that could cut tile patterns more efficiently. Even with the added space and new machinery, orders eventually exceeded production capacity. Edith and Brian were forced to outsource yet again and by chance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had just finished construction on a new, fully outfitted ceramics factory for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma as part of a job creation program. The Cherokees’ initial agreement with an Illinois-based pottery had fallen through at the last minute so they sent a form letter to ceramics manufacturers nationwide trying to find a new tenant. Although the Heaths weren’t comfortable with the distance, in 1981 they agreed to produce tile in Oklahoma under the management of Edith’s sister Anna Jane and her husband Jack. (A few years earlier Edith had worked with Anna Jane on a series of small-scale

projects that Edith always referred to as kiln fillers. Edith, was always thinking about expressive and idiosyncratic ways to use clay, together with her sister and niece Winnie, had experimented with belt buckles, buttons, necklaces, and beads.

Although these had been fun projects for everyone involved, they never provided any financial returns.) In Oklahoma, Anna Jane and Jack did their best to manage daily operations, but still Edith and Brian frequently needed to travel to the plant to train workers and solve reoccurring production problems. Clients were now returning faulty products at an unexpected rate, and the related expenses added up. The cost of shipping tile from Oklahoma to California, where most of their architecture clients were working, was also prohibitive. Edith was never able to achieve the level of quality she wanted from the Oklahoma plant, so when Jack passed away it made sense to end operations, eight years after striking a deal with the Cherokee Nation.

By the mid 1980s, Jay Gustin, having taken on the family business years earlier, had passed away.

The long-standing retail distribution agreement with N.S. Gustin Company had been neglected and sales had dropped significantly. The relationship was scrapped in favor of Edith’s belief that the factory she could handle in-house sales and work directly with retailers. The Restaurant sales had also dropped as the company’s outside sales reps in New York and Los Angeles returned.

Outlets offering Heath Ceramics, which had reached a high of four hundred, were now pared down to one hundred and fifty best-selling retailers so that Heath sales staff could focus their attention on the best accounts. These were later winnowed further to just twenty-seven.

opposite // Early Heath Ceramics Coffee Pot from the 1960s

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WITH NEW STATE STANDARDS requiring lower lead levels in ceramic dinnerware, compliance became a top priority. Heath employees, and fellow ceramic chemist Bill Palmer, helped the company meet and exceed state standard without compromising the strength of their stoneware or the personality of their glazes. The Heaths also had to find a new way to deal with the toxicity of glaze waste, mostly the overspray from the glaze booths.

Again, because of the state’s mandates it became much more difficult and expensive to dispose of the material, now classified as hazardous.

Edith found a way to utilize it: dipping into barrels of waste and screening the material, she poured a generous portion across a few test plates. The results were surprising — a beautiful blue satin finish with few imperfections.

With typical scientific zeal, Edith quickly formatted a series of new glazes using and reducing waste material, some of which are still in production.

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IN 1984, Bill Palmer began working closely with renowned restaurateur Alice Waters and Edith to design a new line of dinnerware. Palmer started working at Heath Ceramics in 1970, just one year before Waters opened Chez Panisse, her Berkeley temple to California cuisine. Bill Palmer, whom Edith considered an asset, was entrusted with the design and production of this important project. The pattern, called the Sausalito line, eventually grew to include for plates, three bowls, and a small coffee cup. The pieces featured a more traditional, wide European rim to frame Water’s modern cooking and presentation. Most significant was the use of a white clay body that had been developed at Heath Ceramics years earlier but never put into production, It achieved its color through high percentages of kaolin, the pure, white clay abundant in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas but also found in Ione, California. Unlike the darker brown body, the white body Palmer used provided a clean palette for glazes and helped him produce the crisp, white dinnerware called for by the Chez Panisse project.

The lighter clay body was also used on older, classic Heath designs, allowing the company to feature a series of fresh, updated glaze colors.

To some, ninety different dinnerware shapes and nearly fifty glazes in production might have been the culmination of a career, but Edith rarely looked back. Liberated from crisis management at the factory because of Palmer’s increased role, she approached her golden anniversary in ceramic design and production with the same excitement and interest that had propelled her initial success. In 1992, Edith designed and released Heath Ceramics’ fourth line of dinnerware, the Plaza line. It offered the same modern design sensibility and durability as her other ware, but in more contemporary, square shapes. Four plate sizes, running from four to twelve inches, used a matching visual vocabulary as earlier ware, which concentrated on simplicity, stacking, and the interplay between different pieces within the collection. Circular ramekins in two sizes and a wellproportioned mug filled out the Plaza line and made the pieces perfect for everyday use or for entertaining.

opposite // Heath Plaza Line in Chocolate Brown, Linen, and Redwood right // Small Ramekin, Heath Plaza Line, Chocolate Brown, 2.75" dia, 2 oz.

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"GOOD DESIGN DOESN'T DEPEND UPON WHETHER SOME– THING IS MADE BY HAND. IN FACT, THERE ARE SOME VERY JUNKY THINGS THAT CAN BE MADE BY HAND. THE IDEA OF MAKING THINGS ON A POTTER'S WHEEL IN AN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY REALLY WAS AN ANACHRONISM AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED. IT WAS OKAY WHILE I WAS LEARNING AND GETTING A FEEL FOR THE CLAY. BUT AFTER ALL, A MACHINE DOESN'T DECIDE WHAT THE SHAPE IS GOING TO BE. A HUMAN BEING HAS TO DECIDE THAT…..SO I FELT I WAS IN AS MUCH CONTROL AS EVER. — EDITH HEATH, on production in a modern society

opposite // Clay mixers at the Sausalito factory.

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65 Introduction

THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW LINE, and a dedicated fan base, surely helped Heath Ceramics at a tenuous time for the company. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Edith had trouble making definitive decisions about the future of the business. She and Brian discussed the possibility of selling the company and even engaged several potential suitors, including Wedgwood. But just when any agreement was even close to being finalized, Edith would invariably scuttle the deal. Edith even approached the University of California at Berkley with the idea that Heath Ceramics could become the school’s ceramic research center. However, no final decision was made about Heath Ceramics’ fate and the company limped into the recession of the early 1990s. Because Edith felt it inappropriate, there was little emphasis on marketing or advertising their ware, a choice that did not help the company’s sales. Brian, who had always been the business manager to Edith’s creative spark, slowing disengaged from running dayto-day operations. Older now, he wanted very much to retire, but Edith was unwilling to let go of her life’s work. Without Brian’s guiding hand Heath Ceramics drifted. Many people close to the company worried that they wouldn’t survive. Their best accounts and those closest to Heath credit long-time employee Jon Brooder for keeping the factory running through these hard time. Brooder started working at Heath in 1964 and became the one person knowledgeable about every facet of the business. During the economic downturn of the early 1990s he served as the manager of tile production but also took an active role in encouraging new accounts. Brooder was able to grow tile sales by striking agreements with companies like Ann Sacks and even helped precipitate a jump in restaurant sales.

Edith, in her eighties, turned her attention to issues of global importance.

Combining ceramic experience, a love for architecture, and a growing interest in sustainability, Edith began tinkering with clay extrusions for the building industry. She ran her ideas past friends like Claude Stoller and, more significantly, the Iranian architect Nader Khalili, one of Iran’s most prominent architects throughout the 1970s. Khalili was the perfect sounding board for Edith’s ideas on the versatility of clay extrusions, since he had searched for new ways to create sustainable shelters using traditional

opposite // Each employee has a unique glazer's stamp to identify them

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materials, including the process of firing small, clay buildings to create ceramic structures in a method and a book he called Geltaftan, or ceramic houses. Khalili, now living in California, met with Edith in Los Angeles, and she showed him samples of her hollow clay bricks, squeezed out of the pug mill back at the factory. He was thrilled with the pieces and encouraged her to continue researching their application. She did, but with age, time was running out, and Edith was never able to find a practical application for the extrusions, especially in quake-prone California.

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BOTH EDITH AND BRIAN had weathered many storms and with over fifty years in the business behind them, Edith’s enthusiasm and creative spirit never waned. A series of health problems beginning in 1993 made it very difficult for her to keep the busy schedule she would have preferred.

She and Brian left daily operations of the factory to their disciplines staff, who carefully negotiated the twists and turns of the changing business landscape. In the pottery industry, it is common for families to remain in the business for generations and for close relatives to work together. Heath Ceramics shared this custom.

Norman and Lelah Kinsley were a husband-and-wife team, he a jiggerman and she a trimmer, who worked for the Heaths in the 1950s. Following in their footsteps, the Kinsley’s daughter and son-in-law also worked at the factory. Paul Gebo, an early dinnerware production manager, worked alongside his wife, Vivianne. Nash Ruiz was a plant manager who, with his glazer wife, Mary, spent almost thirty-five years working at Heath Ceramics.

John and Liola Raley came from Kentucky to work with Edith and stayed for a quarter of a century. Brian’s niece and nephew, Winnie and Russell Crittenden, still work at the factory. Winnie having started full-time in 1974 when she was still a teenager.

More than just families, many individuals helped champion Heath Ceramics over the years. Daphne Alenius came to work at Heath Ceramics in 1963 after internships at Sweden’s Gustavsberg pottery and London’s Briglin pottery. She ran the slip casting department and at one time rented part of the Dorothea from the Heaths. Leon Galleto spent the rest of his career with Heath. Bill Palmer spent two decades in Sausalito and continues to provide technical assistance. After forty years on the job, Jon Brooder is still working at Heath Ceramics, and he is not alone in his commitment.

While most of Heath’s first generation of factory workers originally hailed from California or came from Appalachia, where pottery traditions run deep, today the company is a real melting pot. Longtime employees like Barbara Hallbeck, Miguel Iniquez, Rafael Cazarez, Ignacio Ortiz, Lawrence Wing, Jesus Don Lucas, and Ali Shaukut represent over two hundred years of experience between them. Credit is due to all of them for helping to keep the kiln flames burning.

EDITH AND BRIAN HELD ON AS LONG AS THEY COULD. Late in life, Edith routinely came to work, earning her inveterate love of the ceramics industry on her sleeve. However, through it was a difficult decision, first Brian then Edith slowly released control of the company. They turned to Jay Stewart, the daughter of old family friends Gordon and Fredl Stewart and in many ways the child they never had, to represent them, establishing a trust that permitted Jay to help with the important decisions and take on increasing levels of responsibility. opposite // Galbraith & Paul, Runner, Reed Block Print, 21" x 60" Bud Vase, Lime, Size: 1" open, 3" W x 3.75" H

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IN 2001, BRIAN PASSED AWAY. Discussions about selling the business, something that Edith had never seriously embraced in the past, became more pressing. Jay identified a young couple who showed sincere interest in continuing the Heath tradition and, with Edith’s blessing, Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey took over the business in the summer of 2003. They have dedicated themselves and the company to Edith’s core design philosophies and her original designs.

On December 27, 2005, at the age of ninety-four, Edith passed away at her home in Tiburon, just across the bay from Sausalito. The creative spirit and endless curiosity that bright her from the quiet expanses of the Kiertzner family farm to the urban beat of Chicago and finally to the Golden State will endure in the legacy she has left behind. For a generation of designers striving to create something of this place, something that could describe the dawn of modern life in America, Edith offered simple forms that were finished with a sophisticated understanding of clay and glaze. She was a business owner, a form giver, and a scientist, she made it all look so easy. But it was not. Edith set herself apart from both industrial designers and studio potters by redefining what an artist could accomplish. She communicated through her ware something even more elusive — the complexity of simplicity.

Along her journey, Edith Heath became a defining voice of the twentiethcentury American design and left us with a gift we can enjoy with our friends and families for generations to come.

opposite // Summer Planter Set Colors: Opaque White, Sunrise, and Tangerine

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CHAPTER 2 //

A NEW BEGINNING

CATHERINE BAILEY & ROBIN PETRAVIC

BY THE SUMMER OF 2002,

we had spent the past decade or so as design consultants, Robin as a design engineer and Cathy as an industrial designer, hopping from project to project with mostly big-name American companies, from Nike to Motorola and everything in between.

The disconnect with manufacturing, and the compromises we had to make in order to please those sales executives hungry for added-value bells and whistles, left us tired, frustrated, and looking to rebuild not so much a design career but a design life.

Sometimes change falls into place. Starting with a move across the bridge to Sausalito, primarily to get closer to the contemplative spaces of trees and ocean, we were exploring our new hometown when we came across a funky modern-era factory building tucked into the town’s shipyards.

It was decorated with a tapestry of tile murals, and the company name, Heath, was spelled out in handmade ceramic letters nailed to the exterior wall. The ware and name were familiar, but until that moment we didn’t know it was still made right here. That day we bought one small white bowl at the factory store, but more significantly we came away struck by the honestly of both the pottery and the patina of atmosphere that warmly embraced the factory.

Somehow, this small and threadbare manufacturer encompassed all the elements missing from our design experiences to date, and with that first visit Health became the benchmark by which we judged all our endeavors. Back in our design studios, still imagining our next move, we would reenergize by daydreaming about working at Heath. We imagined how we would walk over to the factory, sit down with raw materials, and reconnect to the physical act of making beautiful and useful objects. It was a dream and a design career we had never thought possible. But, as they say, dreams can come true. This fairy take had a happy ending (and a new beginning when we were able to purchase the company in 2003 and continue its legacy and traditions.

The plant was amazingly self-sufficient. Most of the machinery had been designed, built, and maintained by Heath staff, and longtime employees could jump from job-to-job along the production line, filling in where they were needed most. A strong sense of craftsmanship and pride, alone with an emphasis on the experience of making things, was (and still is) an integral part of the process.

opposite // Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic, owners of Heath Ceramics

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Design movements develop from social and cultural conditions; you could feel, at Heath, how a microculture of individuals and history created myriad intangible threads that found their way into the soul of the final product. Now, after running the company for three years, we have a deeper understanding and a more sincere appreciation of the satisfaction generated by this culture of designer-manufacturers. Heath products have never been trend- or marketdriven. The plan is really quite simple: in the case of dinnerware, give people something good to eat from; in the case of tile, something beautiful to walk on. The goal is for these pieces to become a part of our customers’ daily lives for years to come.

Today we consider how Heath, built and grown out of the midcentury American experience, fits into the culture and economy of the twenty-first century. We place a lot of emphasis on creating a company that makes a high-quality product, testifies to the viability of domestic manufacturing, contributes to the diversity of our local economy, and provides a fair and regarding work environment for all our employees. And we place more emphasis on these principles than we do on maximizing profit. We believe that making things, and the personal satisfaction that comes from it, empowers people, in this case our employees. Likewise, a strong connection between our customers and the products they buy similarly empowers them to contribute to a more balances society. As a model we hope to inspire designers and industrialists alike to consider American manufacturers and to think creatively about their business models, in order to place less emphasis on mass market

and more on quality and design that expresses the real value of making a product. These values were essential to sustaining Heath Ceramics and they remain at the core of the company as it evolves into the future.

Of course, there are parallels between ourselves and Edith and Brian Heath. Edits and Brian had strong social goals, and they believed that the most important part of their work at Heath was to product beauty in simple everyday objects.

We do too. Edith had a very clear aesthetic and functional vision for Heath products that was never to be compromised, even if it meant losing some customers. We continue to uphold those high standards. Their unfaltering commitment to the business they started, and the staff that shared their vision, kept Heath alive while the majority of American potteries competed with each other, struggled with falling market prices, and eventually closed their factories.

This publication is a celebration of Edith’s skill as a form giver, entrepreneur, and creative spirit.

It is equally a salute to Brian Heath, the goodnatured inventor and manager who navigated every bend in the road and successfully carried the pottery through the century. The Heaths and their ware, produced for more than sixty years next to the San Francisco Bay, have touched and enriched many. We continue to be amazed by the stories we hear from families who still treasure the same set of Heath dinnerware they’ve used as children, as adults, and now as grandparents. We hope these simple objects, made with purpose, will touch your heart and hands through daily ritual in the same way they have touched ours.

opposite // Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic inside Heath Ceramics

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INTERVIEW: CATHERINE BAILEY OF HEATH CERAMICS THE HISTORIC CALIFORNIA POTTERY COMPANY SHOWCASED AT THE FUTURE PERFECT

by Julie Wolfson on 16 May 2013 Ten years ago Catherine Bailey's interest in lending a design hand to the small but established California pottery company Heath Ceramics took a detour that resulted in Bailey and her husband serendipitously buying the Sausalito-based company. The twosome set to reviving and preserving Heath's heritage — founded by Edith Heath in 1948 — by creating a flagship store in LA and transforming their San Francisco location into fully functional tile factory, store and creative campus, which is now home to a demonstration kitchen and Blue Bottle Coffee bar. Though Bailey tells us they make decisions slowly and take things step-by-step, their prolific output over the past decade has been nothing short of inspirational.

Events at Heath in Northern California and LA are filled with a jovial mix of customers, artists and collaborators.

To celebrate a new era of Heath, while still honoring its legacy, NYC's The Future Perfect is showcasing the swoon-worthy ceramics in a display at their NoHo shop during the NYCxDesign. To glean a little insight into what the past 10 years have involved, we checked in with Bailey, who reflects on Heath's past, present and future.

WHAT ORIGINALLY INSPIRED YOU TO BUY HEATH CERAMICS 10 YEARS AGO? The most exciting thing to us initially was the holistic nature of what was going on under one roof. Designing and making was all happening in one place. There is also the factory store here, so even a little bit of selling.

From our past experience, it was a frustration when we could not talk to the people who were making things or did not know who was selling them. So at Heath that was really inspiring.

opposite // Heath Ceramics at NYC's The Future Perfect, 2013

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HOW DID PURCHASING THE COMPANY COME ABOUT? That was a leap of faith. Nothing is going to happen if you don’t ask. You could tell physically that the company was in trouble. Everything was kind of a mess, dirty and dusty and there were not a lot of people around.

It was really wonderful design in the past. At that moment in 2002, you could not tell what the past was. I thought I would approach them to see if they needed some design help. We quickly learned in the conversation that wasn’t an option. The company was going to close unless it found a buyer. So I switched gears to figure out how to buy it. It was Robin who had more confidence than I did. It was one step at a time, and the next thing we knew, it was all working out. We were amazed.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE HEATH AESTHETIC? The word I use the most is "classic." The shapes are the essence of what they are intended to be. The coupe line, which is still what most people think of as Heath, has that plate in the essence of a plate. It is so pure and simple that is has become classic. It goes beyond the aesthetic and the feel and the fact that it looks durable. It is not precious. It looks like clay and glaze. All of that comes together to make something that’s obvious about what it is. It has craft in it. It is not mass-produced. It is all very honest.

Material-driven. Classic. Simple.

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE DONE SO MANY SHOWS AND COLLABORATIONS WITH JAPANESE ARTISTS?

above // Labeled pottery mold opposite // Heath Ceramics at NYC's The Future Perfect, 2013

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They fit together really beautifully. There is that certain Japanese aesthetic that is very in sync with Heath. Adam Silverman has always been inspired by Japanese pottery. He has some great relationships in Japan and has honed in on ones that are especially good fits. We do a yearly show with a Japanese potter named Akio Nukaga. His work doesn’t looks anything like Heath, but it’s got the same philosophy — it is very much about the material. If you meet Akio, he is a very humble potter who feels he does very functional work with a small amount of decoration.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH ARTISTS AND PRODUCTS TO ADD TO THE LEGACY PIECES? It starts with shared philosophies and a shared aesthetic. When that starts to come together, you know you’ve got something good. We usually choose to work with people we already have a relationship with. We are friends. We love what they do. We love what they represent.

HOW DID ADAM SILVERMAN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HEATH COME ABOUT? We met Adam about the same time that we bought Heath. I admired his work. His background as an architect turning to be a potter — I found that to be fascinating. We became friends and we were trying to figure out what we should do together. We had lots of ideas, but we landed on that we wanted to do something in LA. We decided to move his studio into the store. It will give our store a sense of purpose and connect it to the LA community. It gave him a platform he could explore with merging some stuff with Heath and allowed him to keep pursuing his own work. He also curates what we have up here and other artists we work with.

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WHAT IS GOING TO BE ON VIEW AT THE FUTURE PERFECT FOR THE HEATH 10 DISPLAY? We shipped a bunch of molds to New York. Those molds are the platform and foundation for showing some finished product. It’s that kind of merging, the essence of how we make a finished object. We have also created a graphical wall to highlight 10 moments in time of our history from the beginning to the present. It is a wall of one hundred postcards. There are ten different postcards that are repeated and they are things that people can take away and get a little deeper in with and understand about this journey of 1948 to 2013. There is consistency but also different eras that the company has traveled through. We try to bring that story out in the display.

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above // Labeled molds and Heath Ceramics pottery

WHAT DOES THE EXCLUSIVE NEW YORK BOWL LOOK LIKE? It’s a classic deep serving bowl. It was designed in 1948. To me, it is the essence of the perfect bowl. The way it fits in your hand. Its presence. It is big enough to be a statement. We have taken that bowl and used our new summer palette of glazes. The New York Bowl has two blue glazes; one dipped over the other that creates a graphic line. Those two glazes react to each other and create a texture. Picking up that bowl you learn about the essence of Heath.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED DURING THE PAST 10 YEARS? We have gained the confidence to follow our gut feelings, the things that we love, and what feels right. In the beginning we were given a lot of advice. People told us this “isn’t going to work," “you can’t do things this way," or “you have to figure out what people want." We just wanted to make things that we love. We thought other people would love them.

We do things slowly, one step at a time; to be comfortable with that step before we take the next step. We need to trust why we are doing what we are doing and what makes it special.

WHAT’S NEXT? For the rest of this year we are going to continue to celebrate the 10 years.

Towards the end of the year we are going to bring Heath 10 back to the West Coast. We are making some clocks to celebrate this moment in time.

We are doing clock collaborations with some of the people we have worked with before. We will have events in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then early next Spring we have another clock that will be more of a production clock with House Industries — who we love working with too. They are very graphical, so it makes sense to do a clock with them. For Robin and I, we have a lot more to do in the San Francisco facility. We have a whole side of the building that we are developing into a creative campus. We want to do something with food. We have a Blue Bottle Coffee bar there now, but we have the space to do something more restaurant-like. Food brings people together. It will be a fun project.

WHAT DO YOU THINK EDITH HEATH WOULD THINK ABOUT ALL THIS? This year I am working on the studio space in San Francisco. I think she would have loved that. We will have a new studio director — kind of like how we work with Adam in Los Angeles — but this is more internal. It’s the studio where we will work to develop new ideas and shapes. We never had that space in Sausalito. I think Edith just went out on the factory and said, “It’s my factory move over I am going to do something here.” Now we have a real studio and a place to think and work in clay and develop ideas.

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NEW OWNERS MOLD REVAMPED FIRM FROM THE SAME CLASSIC CLAY OWNER OF HEATH CERAMICS, SAN FRANCISCO

by Amanda Gold on 4 November 2013 A little over a decade ago, Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic stumbled upon a rundown factory while driving near the Sausalito marina.

There was junk all over the yard. The doors were open, but the inside was a bit of a mess, with sketches hanging on the walls, un-priced dishes stacked on tables, and only a couple of people who appeared to be working. But Bailey recognized the lettering on a sign from some pottery she'd found on eBay. It said "Heath Ceramics."

Within a year, they had bought the business from 93-year-old founder Edith Heath, and were on their way toward turning the artisan stoneware company into a profitable venture.

Now, 10 years later, the couple have shifted from wholesale to retail, with curated showrooms in three locations, one of them a new 60,000 square foot facility on the eastern edge of the Mission.

The company has grown from 24 to 150 employees — including designers, potters, distributors and a sizable production crew. Its dishes are found on restaurant tables worldwide, and its tiles are sought-after decor for sophisticated homes and commercial ventures.

"Heath embodies the Bay Area," said Nate Valentine, who co-owns several San Francisco restaurants. At two of them, Mamacita and Padrecito, the Mexican cuisine is served on Heath plates.

"It takes the philosophy of the restaurants" — using locally grown and sustainable ingredients — "and carries it all the way through to the dishes," Valentine said.

For him, it's also about coming full circle. A Bay Area native, Valentine grew up with bright blue Heath plates on his home table. It's a reminder that the company had strong roots before Bailey and Petravic came on board.

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Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic stumbled upon Heath Ceramics and bought it then restored the company.

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Beatrice Hunt (left) helps out customer Patricia Panqueva at the Heath Ceramics showroom in San Francisco, with its wares in the firm's traditional hues.

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Founded in 1948 by Edith Heath, a Bay Area ceramicist with a respect for natural materials and artisan skill, the company survived for decades on the notion that its mid-century crafts could be made simply and well.

IN THEIR BACKYARD Her approach is what ultimately sold Bailey and Petravic, who were tiring of working with big corporate clients when they discovered Heath in their own backyard.

Of course, buying a ceramics company was never really part of the plan.

"We didn't know what we wanted to do," said Bailey. "We knew what we didn't want to do, which was what we were doing."

At the time, they were working together in industrial design, tackling projects for clients like Motorola, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble. She co-owned One and Co., a design consulting firm; he was a product designer. The two had been introduced through mutual friends, and found a passion for working — and playing — together almost immediately. Friends first, the pair started dating in 2000 and married in 2009.

Bailey, from New Jersey, had graduated from Syracuse with a degree in industrial design and then gone to work for Nike in Portland, Ore. She stayed for five years before moving to San Francisco, intending to start her own business.

"It was a great experience, but I learned that I didn't want to have a small part in a big company," Bailey said.

Petravic was born in England and moved to New Jersey when he was 8, when his parents, both research physicists, took jobs at Princeton. He graduated from Tufts, then went to Stanford for graduate work in design.

After earning his degree in 1997, he worked for a think tank, then moved to San Francisco — coincidentally about two blocks from Heath's current factory and showroom complex — and started working as a product designer.

COMPLETE CYCLE As the two collaborated through Bailey's design consulting firm, One & Co., they realized that they wanted to see things through from start to finish, rather than just doing parts of projects.

In the lounge in Heath's new San Francisco factory, the two reminisced about finding Heath. Casually dressed and sporting coordinating dark plastic-rimmed glasses, they bounce dialogue fluidly between them — she, a little artsy and more extroverted, dominates the conversation; he, a little more hipster and reserved, pipes in to complete her thoughts.

Pushing through the front doors of Heath in 2002, the couple, then in their early 30s, found themselves in what felt like an antique shop. Their first impression was, "OK, nobody has taken this over, nobody has invested any

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money into it. It's raw," Bailey said. She thought she might be able to help on the consulting front — kind of a pro-bono thing — just because she was intrigued.

"I knew this much about pottery," she said, making a pinch sign with her thumb and forefinger.

But, designwise, with the simple lines, classic shapes and spectrum of colors, they knew the bones were there.

The couple wrote to Edith Heath, but, at 93 and suffering from dementia, she didn't respond.

They then got in touch with Jay Stewart, the trustee of her estate.

In one of those serendipitous moments, the three realized their interests were aligned. Bailey and Petravic were looking for a business that they could hang on to and improve. Stewart was a preservationist who was emotionally tied to Heath, and wanted owners who cared.

The deal was done.

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NEVER COMPROMISE "When we first found Heath, it was like, 'Hey, here's this place where they still design everything and make everything,' and we decided we were never going to compromise on that," Petravic said.

They also decided to maintain the locally made concept. "It was the kind of product that didn't need to be outsourced," he added.

On the business side, however, it did need a change. Because the pieces are works of art — dinner plates average around $38 — they needed to tell the backstory, to let the public see the pottery in showrooms and galleries, and to expand the marketplace.

They revamped the Sausalito store, opened a showroom in Los Angeles and a third showroom in San Francisco as part of the factory. And they reached out to chefs.

above // Serving bowls display a characteristic Heath color

The Slanted Door's Ferry Building location was "Everything is made in the USA, by hand, and their first big restaurant project. they're very committed to sustainability on all levels," said Natalie Chanin, whose handmade After working with chef/owner Charles Phan and clothing and linens can be found in Heath showarchitect Olle Lundberg on a custom color palrooms, along with etched plates created as a ette for their dishes, the Heath owners said they partnership between the two companies. would sweeten the deal for something in return.

"We asked if he would put Heath on the menu," she said. "Everyone was starting to put down this kind of detail — where the food came from, what farm. We figured, 'Why not the plates?'"

Phan agreed. The ambitious restaurant, the first large, upscale Vietnamese spot in the country, was an immediate hit. Chefs from all over were coming to see it, and when they did, they saw Heath dishes on the tables.

Nearly a decade later, Heath dishes are in more than 100 restaurants from the Bay Area to Barcelona, emblematic of a movement that places great emphasis on sustainability and artisanship. In the Bay Area, Heath plates, ramekins and bowls hold the food at Pizzaiolo, Nopa, Coi, Aziza and more. Their tiles decorate Laconda and Farmshop, among others.

'INTEGRITY AND VALUES' "My rule is to make sure everything in the store has the same integrity and values," Bailey said.

"Everything has to be manufactured close to where it's designed or the designer has to have a strong relationship with its manufacturer. And strong doesn't mean you like your factory in China."

And, of course, every item must be beautiful.

Heath's evolution is being celebrated Dec. 7 with 10th-anniversary shows at the San Francisco and Los Angeles stores. To mark the passage of time, limited-edition clocks from eight artists will be on display and for sale.

But for now the focus is on the new San Francisco building, which encompasses the factory, showroom, and spaces for events and for a possible future restaurant. It also includes areas rented to other producers — a letterpress and denim company among them.

"When I go to out to eat, I give a little nod to the restaurant if they're using Heath," Mamacita's Valentine said. The dishes aren't cheap — he cringes every time one breaks in the restaurant — so "I know they care more about what they're "We're hoping that the building will be a commuputting on the plates and what they're doing as nity of small-scale makers," Bailey said. "It's nice a whole, rather than about just making money." for them because we already provide a destination, and it's inspirational for us to see what The two even created a special set of dishes with other small businesses are doing."

Alice Waters — the Chez Panisse line. They're used in the restaurant and are also sold in the Heath The two believe the next step may be to start showrooms, where a portion of proceeds from the working with another natural material. Both are sales goes to the Edible Schoolyard Project. open to another creative prospect.

Restaurants have become a big part of the business, but starting a bridal registry has as well.

To make the registry work, Bailey and Petravic

Chances are, they'll know it when they stumble upon it.

had to expand their offerings, and that meant finding products that fit with their concept— sleek wood peppermills from Oakland's Studio44eighty, for example. As a result, small-scale craftspeople have found a high-profile outlet.

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CHAPTER 3 //

TABLEWARE

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opposite // These three pitchers, from the early 1940s, represent some of Edith's earliest known ceramicware. The variations in shape, size, and glaze show a ceramicist still in the process of learning her craft and one dedicated to resolving questions to of chemical composition and form.

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above // Still somewhat awkward in its proportions, this teapot, with its hand-fashioned metal handle, was a fore-runner to the final Heath teapot that has become an American design icon. opposite // Edith's interest in clay and glaze is represented in this handsome vase where a colorful web of glaze is layered over, but still reveals, a dark clay body.

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95 Introduction

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// RIM LINE Created to accommodate Heath's growing restaurant business, this line's namesake is a wide rim for easier handling and stacking. The functional style and straightforward proportions make it a true product of the modern ear, yet with a distinct Northern California feel. Introduced in 1960.

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// COUPE LINE As soon as it was released, Edith's Coupe line became an instant hit. Still in production today, Coupe is an early example of honesty in design and simplicity in form and fully embodies the spirit of American modernism.

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// ALABAMA CHANIN LINE Inspired by the stitching on traditional southern quilts, this line features the hand-etched dinner and salad plates. This set adds color, texture, and pattern with ethereal sensibility.

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// CHEZ PANISSE LINE Designed exclusively for Alice Waters' Chez Panisse restaurant in 2007.

This line takes cues from classic porcelain restaurant ware, with a Heath twist.

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// HEATH PLAZA LINE Edith's last line of dinnerware, Plaza, was inspired by pan-Pacific influences.

With a variety of plate sizes, and matching accessories like mugs and cups, the Plaza line represents versatility for the future.

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above // Bird's Nest Etched Deep Serving Bowl, Size: 6" dia, 4" H. 35 oz opposite // Mutli-Stem Vase, Size: 2" open, 3.75" W x 9" H Color: Olive

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CHAPTER 4 //

TILES

PLUIJM HOUSE Marrakech, Morocco // Ank van der Pluijm

This home's design is driven by the materials used. All of the choices have been made very carefully, and the tile gives the space a feeling of solidity that other materials wouldn't, while adding a decorative element. The mix of green patterns on the side of the kitchen counter create a lighter visual interest where there would otherwise be a solid mass that wouldn't balance out the solid column to the right. In all the spaces, particularly behind the kitchen sink, the tile has been fitted together pretty tight so that grout lines are not prevalent, allowing the variation in surface texture and color to create the depth and pattern in the installations. This is especially important given that natural light is a major design element in all the rooms, and the tiles chosen, with their inherently soft, handmade feel, are only enhanced by its presence. The looseness in irregularity of shape is fitting with the rest of the spaces, from the wooden reed ceiling to the plaster walls. Greens are a common hue, and in the bathroom, the subtle pattern of different shades creates a charming band across the room.

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113 Introduction

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FARMSHOP RESTAURANT Larkspur, California // Commune Design

Design is material. Commune's execution of Farmshop Restaurant embodies this ideal in its truest sense, with walnut wood, copper green tiles, teal velvet, natural concrete, and blackened steel making up the bar and lounge. Each material is pure, honest, and of equal importance as you experience the space. The expanse of green tile in its classic rectangular shape and solid color is not the focal point, but a backdrop to balance the materials surrounding it and an expression of the beautiful variation of hue that comes along with hand-glazed tile. In the kitchen and surrounding the wood-fired grill, the long green wall transitions to a sea of matte white. Floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall white tiles define the kitchen as well as the side of the counters in the serving area. The tile work identifies the cooking areas as being as important as the dining and bar areas and gives everything in the space a sense of timeless permanence.

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MARGARIDO HOUSE Oakland, California // Onion Flats and Medium Plenty

This home was the first LEED-H Platinum certified custom home in Northern California. Located in the Oakland Hills across the bay from Heath's factory, it was the first project that used our kiln shelves (furniture that once held Heath tiles as they fired in our kilns.) The shelves had come to the end of their useful life and were glazed and repurposed into exterior wall cladding and a patio door. Several of the bathrooms in the house also used Heath tile, stacked in a modern grid pattern, with strong color and high variation to soften the crisp spaces. The use of floor-to-ceiling tile is also important in keeping with the modern practice of using large, single planes of material. Even the niches of tile in the showers are consistent with the design. The mix of natural light, colorful glazes, and water create relaxing spaces for bathing.

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YARDHOUSE London, England // Assemble Studio

The architects designed this building as an affordable creative workspace, featuring individual studios and communal spaces. A simple structure that's relatively cheap to build and assemble (and even disassemble and move elsewhere) creates the affordability. In keeping with the spirit and vision of the use, not for a quiet desk work but for a range of messy and noisy tasks, the concrete tiles used to shingle the exterior facade were all handmade on-site. The beautiful range of colors was created by adding pigment to the concrete, but its the process that stands out. No measuring, no repeating, no standardization — whoever was making tile at the time just added pigment to each batch, however much they liked. The same loosely creative process was followed in hanging them. The result is a beautiful, randomly colorful wall of art pulled together by the consistency in shape and tonality of the concrete. The choice of materials and the creative spirit in which they were made work so well with the intent of the building and how it's used.

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HEATH UPSTAIRS OFFICE AND APARTMENT San Francisco, California // Catherine Bailey and the Heath Design Team

We're not sure what to call this space, as it's a catch all for many aspects of our lives. Located in the same building as our San Francisco factory, it serves mostly as an office and hideaway for the two of us, perfect for when we need to get away and focus or just clear our heads. But as a couple that works together, lines between home and work become very blurred.

Sometimes when we're working here, our son is playing with Legos, and the dogs are sprawled on the floor and sofa. The tile on the kitchen wall extends to the ceiling and defines the end of the room, with the shelves and flue sitting atop the tile as secondary elements. The tile, with its volcanic texture, was chosen to soften the space's concrete walls and to work with the original rough plank floors, so that there's a comfortable progression between the old and new elements. The bright reds and blues of the tile wall mural provide a colorful counterpoint to break up the concrete and raw wood hues of the materials that define the space. Every element is in keeping with the overall building's evolution; new materials working with old materials that have stood the test of time.

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CHAPTER 5 //

REFERENCES

INDEX

A

H

S

Addams, Jane, 21, 23

Heath Apartment, 122-125

San Francisco Art Institute, 29

Alabama Chanin Line, 14, 89,

House Industries, 14, 83

Sausalito, 43, 59

100-101

Hull House, 21, 23, 44

Sausalito Line, 61

Arneson, Robert, 51

Saxbo, 52

Art Through the Ages, 21

J

Smithsonian, 14

Arts and Crafts Movement, 32

Jigger, 26-27, 37, 39, 41, 52, 56, 69

Starr, Ellen Gates, 23

Ashtray, 48-49, 52-53, 54

Stewart, Jay, 69, 88 K

Summer Planter, 70

B

Kaufmann, Edgar, 47

Bailey, Catherine, 14, 70, 74-75,

Khalili, Nader, 66

T

76-77

Kiertzner, Karolina, 18, 21

Tangerine, 70, 105

Bauhaus, 23, 24, 44, 47, 48

Kiertzner, Nils, 18

Teapot, 94

Berkley, 26, 30, 66

Kim, Christina, 14

Tile Makes The Room, 14

Bird's Nest Etched, 106

Kinsley, Lelah, 69

Toynbee Hall, 23

Boiler Room, 14

Kinsley, Norman, 69

Brewer, Bill, 35, 36, 38

V

Brooder, Jon, 66, 69

L

Bud Vase, 14, 69

Ladd and Kelsey, 55

Vase, 94-95, 106-107

Linen, 60-61, 89

W

C

Los Angeles County Museum of

Water Pitchers, 30-31

Cafe Bowl, 14

Waters, Alice, 14, 61, 89, 102-103

Art, 52, 55

Cahill, Holger, 23, 24-25

Wedgwood, 56, 66

California Labor School, 35

M

Williams, Carolyn, 35

California School of Fine Arts, 29

MacAgy, Jermayne, 35

Works Progress Administration, 23

Ceramicware, 30-31, 92-93

Margarido House, 118-19

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 23, 37, 44, 47

Cherokee Nation, 59

Marie Basic Dinnerware, 12

Chez Panisse Line, 14, 61, 89,

Marinship Yard, 50-51

Y

102-103

Marquis & Stoller, 14

Yardhouse, 120-121

Chicago Normal School, 20

Mason Building, 38-39, 51

Chicago School of Design, 24

Mission District, 13, 14

Chocolate Brown, 12-13, 60-61

Moholy-Nagy, L谩szl贸, 23, 24-25,

Clay Street, 32-33, 36, 38, 47

Coffee Pot, 58-59

Museum of Modern Art, 24, 47

29, 44, 48

Coupe Line, 12-13, 41, 56, 80, 98-99 Crittenden, Winnie, 43, 69

N N.S. Gustin, 37, 42-43, 44, 48,

D

52, 59

Dewey, John, 20, 29 Dorothea, 43, 69

O Opaque White, 70

F Farmhouse Restaurant, 114-117

P

Federal Art Project, 23, 24-25, 29

Palmer, Bill, 60-61, 69 Petravic, Robin, 14, 70, 74-75, 76-77

G

Pitcher, 30-31, 92-93

Galbraith & Paul, 69

Plaza Line, 61, 104-105

Galleto, Leon, 52, 69

Pluijm House, 112-113

Gardner, Helen, 20

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Glazer Stamp, 66-67

R

Gropius, Walter, 44, 48

Ramekin, 61

Gump, 35, 36-37, 38

Redwood, 60-61

Gustin, Nelson, 37, 38, 48

Rim Line, 14, 56-57, 96-97

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1]

Bailey, Catherine, and Robin Petravic. Tile Makes the Room: Good Design

from Heath Ceramics. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2015. Print.

[2] Gold, Amanda. “New Owners Mold Revamped Firm From Same Classic Clay.” SFGate, 04 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. <http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/New-owners-mold-revamped-firm-fromsame-classic-4950374.php> [3]

Halper, Vicki, and Diane Douglas. Choosing Craft: The Artist's Viewpoint.

The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

[4]

"Heath Ceramics." Heath Ceramics. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2016.

<http://www.heathceramics.com/> [5]

"Heath Ceramics" Heath Ceramics. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

<http://heathceramics.tumblr.com/> [6]

Kaplan, Wendy. Living in a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965. Los

Angeles: Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Print.

[7]

Klausner, Amos. Heath Ceramics: The Complexity of Simplicity. San Fran-

cisco: Chronicle, 2016. Print.

[8]

Wolfson, Julie. “Interview: Catherine Bailey of Heath Ceramics.” Cool Hunt-

ing, 16 May 2013. Web. 02 Apr. 2016. <http://www.coolhunting.com/design/heath-10-at-the-future-perfect>

129 Chapter 5

Durable, honest, and handsome, the tableware and tiles created by Heath Ceramics are design icons. Made according to the artisanal tradition conceived

by Edith heath in the mid-1940s — when she founded the company in Sausalito, California — Heathware is as admired and sought after today as it was half a century ago. Heath is one of the few remaining mid-century modern American potteries, and now its remarkable history, legacy, and culture, along with the details of its output and the extraordinary life of the woman who created it.