At its Florentine factory, Ginori 1735 still casts a spell

Every morning at 8am, 250 employees, many of whom used to live in the specially built homes surrounding the Ginori 1735 manifattura, put on a uniform of teal tracksuits and tees, and assemble in the shadow of the Ginori water tower. At the sound of the thrice-daily siren, they begin producing up to 8,000 pieces of white and decorative porcelain per day. This has long been the ritual at the 100,000sq m site that lies 6km north of Florence.

It takes 10 years to be considered a master in a single art of porcelain production. Though partially mechanised, much of the work here continues to be performed by hand. Every aspect, including colour creation, happens in-house.

Ginori 1735 employs a team of four chemists to test its distinctive palette of tones. The melding of feldspar, quartz and kaolin to create porcelain remains a kind of magic. “Porcelain is not easy to produce,” says Alain Prost, the company’s chief executive, pointing out that each of its bestselling Oriente Italiano plates – a style revived by former creative director Alessandro Michele of Gucci in 2013 – undergoes 25 individual processes, passing through no less than seven pairs of hands.

Every plate, cup, pot and platter starts life in the style room – a space that gives clues to the scope of Ginori’s reach. Clients range from Hotel Santa Maria Novella to 5 Hertford Street, the London private members’ club. “The Ginori china in the club is an 18th-century design, but looks contemporary,” says founder Robin Birley. “I am devoted to them. I never go anywhere else.”

The style-room mood boards are currently clad in the visual inspiration for the forthcoming Diva collection (priced £55 to £535), which will be unveiled this month at Milan Design Week. It’s a soft reinterpretation of former artistic director Giovanni Gariboldi’s Colonna, a design that won the prestigious Compasso d’Oro award in 1954 (Gariboldi worked with Ginori from 1926, becoming artistic director in 1946).

I have discovered a fascinating and creative universe

From here, the Diva designs will wend their way to the moulding area, a long, rectangular space on the top floor punctuated by marble-topped, wooden work benches. The only computer in sight is covered in bubble wrap to save it from the chalky dust. In this space, sculptors work by hand, using pencil sketches as their guide, to create plaster models that will become moulds before being sent to be cast.

Every surface is crowded with urns, statues, rosettes, roundels and reliefs – a living reminder of Ginori’s sculptural legacy. The walls are hung with a series of late-Florentine-Baroque-style plaster panels that once decorated the altar at the nearby Duomo. Cloth-clad pinboards are covered in iterations of handles, lids and decorative elements, from starfish to dragonflies, goats and gargoyles – each is a hand-forged work of art in its own right. Shelves are stacked with sleeping cherubs, conch shells, lions, saints – even a figure of Pope John Paul II. 

History looms large at Ginori 1735. Here, in 1737, together with a master painter and kilnman from Vienna, the Marquis Carlo Andrea Ignazio Ginori, a well-travelled politician and diplomat who’d encountered the so-called “white gold” (hard-paste porcelain) in China, established the Manifattura di Doccia. Within a decade there were two highly fruitful kilns – one for majolica and one for porcelain – and 55 employees. By 1850, staff numbers had more than quadrupled. The Doccia streets – including via del porcellana – still nod to this productive moment.

Ginori obsessively gathered sculptor’s moulds, spanning the late renaissance and baroque periods, which became the template for the company’s earliest output. By the 1770s, these were miniaturised to decorate dinner tables, feeding the new trend for tableware. After the second world war, production was moved down the hillside to the south of the railway line (which once carried porcelain goods across Italy) where it remains.

Life at Ginori 1735 retains its reassuring creative rhythm. One of the most awe-inspiring corners of the modern manifattura is the place that moulds go to rest. Known as Il Voltone, this icily silent, 5m-high cavernous archive is home to towering shelves that teeter with the millions of moulds generated over the centuries. The atmosphere is part British Museum, part monastic B&Q. It’s worlds away from the hum and whirr – and not always pleasant resinous scent – of the factory floor, where pieces are cast, fired and frequently hand-glazed and hand-painted.

One employee, wearing glasses and teal shoelaces that match her Ginori track pants, listens to podcasts while carefully hand-applying a gilt edge to a platter with a flat brush. She can complete 200 plates a day. The mood is akin to an art school: “I wasn’t interested in tableware before,” admits Prost, who joined Kering, owners of Ginori 1735, in 2019. “But I have discovered a fascinating, and very creative, universe.” 

Slowly but surely, over the past five years Prost and his team have worked to revive what he terms “a sleeping beauty”. They continue to mine its artistic heritage to highlight what Prost calls its “unique savoir-faire”, and much of his mission has been tapping into evolving tastes and rituals around mealtimes, while simultaneously expanding the offering into the realm of home decor. “We’re not simply selling tableware any more,” says Prost of the textiles, furniture and home accessories by designer Luca Nichetto, which launched at last year’s Milan Design Week. “It’s a way to express your personality.”

Prost’s ethos echoes the era of Ginori’s greatest alumnus – Gio Ponti. Known as the father of modern Italian design, Ponti joined Ginori as a young architect, serving as artistic director in the 1920s and 1930s and continuing to be linked to the company for more than six decades until his death in 1979. Home, he wrote, is, “an expression of the elegant beauty of living”. His debut Ginori family of decorations, Le Mie Donne (My Women), melds art deco forms with the architecture of antiquity – today, it takes up to 40 hours to hand-paint a single Ponti bowl, a task trusted to only two master painters. These artisans hold Ginori’s past, present and future in their steady hands.