The Best Luxury Tableware Brands Worth Collecting

The table is among the most intimate stages of domestic life. What you place upon it — the weight of a plate, the balance of a knife, the colour of a glass — shapes every meal served at it. These are the tableware houses whose work we believe deserves a place in a considered collection.

Ginori 1735

Founded in Florence in 1735, Ginori is one of the oldest and most distinguished porcelain manufacturers in Europe. Their Oriente Italiano pattern — a vivid reimagining of eighteenth-century Chinoiserie motifs — has become one of the defining table objects of contemporary luxury. The company's revival under the creative direction of Luke Edward Hall restored its relevance to the present while deepening its historical resonance. For collectors, early Ginori pieces represent significant investment potential; for those building a working table, the current collection offers extraordinary quality at prices that reflect genuine manufacturing costs.

Cutipol

The Braga-based Portuguese manufacturer produces what many consider the finest contemporary flatware in the world. The Moon collection — a five-piece setting in matte or polished stainless steel with a characteristic black or ivory resin handle — has become something of a modern classic: reproduced endlessly but never equalled. The key to Cutipol's quality lies in its finishing: each piece is hand-polished to a standard that mass production cannot approach. The balance in the hand is immediately perceptible.

Astier de Villatte

The Paris-based ceramics house occupies a unique position: its handmade earthenware, fired at low temperatures and finished in an opaque white glaze over a dark clay body, produces pieces of calculated imperfection. No two pieces are identical. The irregularities are not defects but signatures — evidence of a production process that resists standardisation as a philosophical commitment. Astier de Villatte is the tableware choice of people who find perfection boring.

Iittala

The Finnish glassware manufacturer, founded in 1881, remains the definitive voice of Nordic design in glass. The Tapio collection — designed by Tapio Wirkkala in the 1950s — and the Aalto vase by Alvar Aalto have both passed into design history without losing their relevance or desirability. For collectors interested in Scandinavian modernism, Iittala is an essential category.

Richard Ginori's Rivals: Herend and Meissen

The Central European porcelain tradition is represented at its peak by Herend, the Hungarian manufacture whose hand-painted patterns have been produced continuously since 1826, and Meissen, the Saxon house that produced Europe's first hard-paste porcelain in 1710. Both represent significant collecting categories in their own right, with well-documented auction markets and active scholarship. For the table collector building a working service, Herend in particular offers exceptional value relative to its historical importance.

Building a table collection

The most satisfying approach to tableware collecting is not to match everything — that is the logic of the department store, not the collector. More interesting is the eclectic table: a service plate of one provenance paired with stemware of another, flatware from a different tradition entirely. The rule is not consistency but coherence — pieces that speak to each other across their differences.

Magna Mercatus maintains curated tableware from a selection of these houses. We are available to advise on building a service that works as a collection as well as a set.