Sausalito is a small city of around 8,000 residents located just to the north of San Francisco. Picturesque views, temperatures that rarely climb above 65 degrees, and its close proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge have made Sausalito a very popular tourist destination. Sausalito was my destination to visit the factory and store of Heath Ceramics, founded by Edith Heath in 1948.
Edith Heath’s work resides in many museums and collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Sadly, Edith passed away in 2005, but her legacy and passion lives on. An exhibit of Vintage Heath Ceramics can be seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the exhibition “California Design, 1930 – 1965: Living in a Modern Way.”
All products are made in their factory in Sausalito by 60 skilled craftsmen in the same kilns 
built in 1959 by Brian Heath when the factory originally opened that year. The tableware made here is of the highest quality, typically simple in appearance, but with subtle artistic characteristics that easily set it apart from department store pottery. It’s no wonder that customers return year after year, decade after decade….and as a testament to the quality, Heath is one of the few remaining mid-century potteries still in action.
One of the things that truly sets Heath Ceramics apart is that all of their tableware is made locally, something that is next to impossible to find in today’s outsourced world. While not priced to compete with mass-produced pottery manufactured by the millions in Asian factories, Heath’s domestically produced tableware lasts for a lifetime.
My favorite of their tableware lines is the “Coupe”, originally designed in the 1940′s. Readers of It’s Just Light will undoubtedly recognize the simple, yet elegant design in other entries. One of their newest lines is the Chez Panisse line, a collaboration between Heath Ceramics, Christina Kim, and of course, Alice Waters.
In addition to tableware, Heath also produces tile. In fact, Edith Heath was the first non-architect to win the AIA Gold Medal Award for her exterior tile at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. Their gallery of Heath Tile installations is certainly inspiring – I encourage my many interior designer friends to have a look. For those of us who aren’t quite ambitious enough to undertake a big tile project, their house number collections are pretty fantastic. I particularly like the Eames collection in paprika.
Reaching a maximum of 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, the fifty year old kilns fire around 400 pieces of tableware each day.
A plate from Heath's Coupe line in action!
