A Touch of Elegance: Entertaining with Handcrafted Dinnerware

When it comes to entertaining guests at your home, presentation can be critical. While your choice of refreshments and meal elements are certainly important, how they are delivered to your guests can often make all the difference in the world. And face it: even your finest machine-made dishes still offer little more than monotony and sameness of the sort that any guest could find in the cheap diner across town. To truly dazzle your guests, you need something that can provide a more unique and elegant experience.

You need handcrafted dinnerware. That’s right; one of your very best options for providing your guests with a truly innovative and memorable experience is the same type of handmade plates, serving dishes, bowls, and cups that your ancestors relied on throughout most of history. Those dishes had real weight and a sense of value that far exceeded their rustic appearance. In those days, artisan craftsmanship was present at every table. So why would modern people find them so elegant today?

Part of the appeal is a natural reaction to the extreme sanitization that has characterized dinnerware trends for many decades now. The precision created by machine manufacturing has helped to make various types of dinnerware more accessible to the masses than at any time in history. Mass production does tend to have that effect, after all. There’s always a price to be paid for such things, however, and in this case that price has involved the loss of character.

Handmade dinnerware has the type of character that helps connect people to the food they eat. There is something natural and soothingly simple about eating from a dish that has been lovingly crafted by human hands. The materials used by potters are of the earth, in much the same way that we are of the earth. Clay and water; water and clay – humanity and its pottery have always shared that bond.

There’s uniqueness about handcrafted dishes that can’t be duplicated by machines. Each piece is its own entity, different from all others. A subtly difference in shape, an imperfection here, a slight change in color there; all of these unique characteristics provide the character that machined porcelain lacks. Oh sure, those mass-produced items look pretty. And they’re certainly uniform in every way. What they lack, however, is that feeling of import. They just feel disposable, even when their price tag reveals them to be anything but thruway items.

When your guests dine from handcrafted dinnerware, they can feel just how important each dish actually is. They can sense that each item has a story to tell – a love story between potter and clay that stretches backwards through history to that first moment when man’s hand touched potter’s clay.

So, yes, you need handcrafted dishes like those you can review in our Gaia Collection if you want to achieve a sense of elegance while still maintaining the warmth of hearth and home that sterile machine-wrought porcelain can never hope to match. Your guests will love it!