New York, 1830s, to Limoges, 1842.

Haviland began as an American trading family. French Wikipedia says David Haviland and his brother Edmond took over a shop on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, and that in 1838 David joined another brother, Daniel, in an import business called D.G. & D. Haviland, which took the name Haviland Brothers and Company in 1852. A notice by Laurens d’Albis on the Musée protestant site, published in December 2013, places the family’s store at 47 John Street, near Wall Street, and says its stock included English tableware.

The move to France has a family version and a historian’s version. In 2009 the journal Hommes & Migrations (issue 1282) published an article by Fabrice Grognet that quotes a letter written by Charles Edward Haviland for a jury member of the 1878 Paris Exposition. In it, Charles says that in 1839 his father, then importing English porcelain and earthenware in New York, saw a French porcelain tea service by chance and set out to find where such ware was made. In the same article, Laurens d’Albis says he regards the story as closer to legend, and links the move instead to an economic crisis in the United States that pushed the family to diversify.

Grognet writes that David travelled alone, in 1840, to Foëcy in the Berry, to the Pillivuyt family of porcelain makers, who already supplied the brothers’ New York shop, and returned there with his wife and son in the autumn of 1841. He settled in Limoges in the spring of 1842 with his wife, Mary, and their elder son, Charles. The Musée protestant notice says a second son, Théodore, was born that August, and that Limoges was chosen for its local deposits of kaolin, the clay that porcelain needs.

Initially David bought finished pieces from local factories and shipped them to his brothers in New York. The Musée protestant notice says the ware sold well enough for him to buy his own moulds and have pieces made to American habits, and then to decorate bought-in white ware himself. Grognet dates his own decorating workshop to 1847, and says the period brought an official White House table service ordered by Mary Lincoln. French Wikipedia says an integrated factory, on today’s avenue Garibaldi, was working by 1853.

Two brothers, two factories, one name.

The American Civil War cut the business off from its main market. The Musée protestant notice says production for the United States had to stop and that Haviland Brothers failed; Grognet’s article dates the New York failure to 1863 and says the Limoges house then took the name Haviland & Co. The notice gives the founding date of the French company, Haviland et Compagnie, as 1 March 1864. Théodore was sent to the United States after the war to rebuild sales there, while Charles took charge in Limoges.

Charles turned to artists. The Musée protestant notice says that on 1 July 1872 he hired Félix Bracquemond, then head of the painting workshop at the Sèvres manufactory, and gave him artistic direction of a design and printing studio at 116 rue Michel-Ange in Paris, known as the Atelier d’Auteuil. It says the studio developed chromolithographed decoration, which carried drawing and colour together, and a layout of motifs drawn from Japanese art and Impressionist painting. French Wikipedia adds that Charles married the daughter of the art critic Philippe Burty, that the house worked with Albert Dammouse and Ernest Chaplet, and that Bracquemond withdrew in 1881.

The brothers then went separate ways. Grognet writes that Théodore returned to France after his father’s death in 1879 and founded a more modern factory in 1892. French Wikipedia gives a finer sequence: Haviland & Co. was dissolved on 31 December 1891, a new company was formed under Charles and his eldest son Georges, and Théodore’s own factory was inaugurated on 3 August 1893. From then on Limoges had two Haviland firms, Charles’s house and Théodore Haviland, each with its own production.

The Musée protestant notice says William Dannat Haviland, Théodore’s son, joined the factory in 1903 and became its director in 1919. It says he introduced celadon and ivory bodies, Art Deco shapes and work by artists including Édouard Marcel Sandoz, Jean Dufy and Suzanne Lalique. French Wikipedia says Charles’s company did not survive the crisis of the 1930s, its avenue Garibaldi factory closing in 1931, and that in 1941 William bought the models, marks and rights of the original house, reuniting the name on Théodore’s site on avenue Émile-Labussière.

Factory towns, family hands, later owners.

A porcelain house carries its identity in places a reader might not think of as branding. The first is the factory mark: a small device painted or printed on the underside of a piece, often in underglaze blue, which has served for centuries as signature, guarantee and date code at once. Collectors read changes in a mark’s drawing, colour or wording to place a piece in time, which makes the backstamp a quiet but exacting part of the visual system.

The second is the pattern name. Services are catalogued under names and numbers that stay in use for generations, so a pattern works almost like a sub-brand, with its own motif, border and shape family. Cobalt blue, the pigment that survives high firing under the glaze, recurs across many European houses and often doubles as the house colour on packaging and print.

Finally there is place. The factory town and the museum attached to a manufactory act as brand surfaces in their own right: archives of shapes and moulds, showrooms, and the backdrop for how a house tells its own history. For designers, the lesson is that a heritage identity can live in a mark, a name and an address as much as in a logo.

Later owners, one Limoges site.

French Wikipedia says the factory stayed in Haviland family hands until 1972 and kept the name under later owners. It says production moved to the industrial zone north of Limoges in 1990 and that the historic factory was demolished in 1991. It also records that the business passed in May 2003 to a new company named Haviland, and that the holding company Financière Saint-Germain, led by Prosper Amouyal, acquired it the following year.

The latest change came in December 2024. France 3 Régions reported on 13 December 2024 that the Limoges porcelain maker Bernardaud had announced, in a statement that day, the purchase of all the shares in the Haviland company. The report quoted the statement as saying the two houses would keep their own brands and that Haviland would continue to produce its collections in its Limoges workshops. A follow-up by France 3 Régions on 14 December 2024 said the announcement was made by Michel Bernardaud, and FashionNetwork reported on 15 December 2024 that he had told the local daily Le Populaire du Centre that Bernardaud would keep the factory. Bernardaud has owned Haviland since December 2024.

The house still makes and sells from Limoges. France Bleu reported on 2 October 2023 that Haviland had opened a shop near the route de Toulouse in Limoges selling undecorated white and celadon tableware with small flaws, for households and restaurants. French Wikipedia says Haviland pieces fall under the porcelaine de Limoges geographical indication created by the French state in 2017, and describes a factory split into a white-ware section, a decorating section and an in-house workshop for decals.

The family name also passed into literature. French Wikipedia says the writer Jacques Chardonne, a grandson of David Haviland, drew on the family for his novel Les Destinées sentimentales, published in 1934, which Olivier Assayas adapted for the cinema in 2000. It also says that, in 1880, the factory made a service for Rutherford B. Hayes whose pieces carried plants and animals based on watercolours by Theodore R. Davis.

For a design guide, Haviland shows how a porcelain house can carry one family name through a split, a reunion and several owners while keeping the same Limoges address book of artists and patterns. Compare Bernardaud, its owner since 2024, and Wedgwood, the Staffordshire house in this collection. For this guide we use cobalt, gilt and biscuit with a classic serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Haviland’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.