The 23 Workshops

When I left Sotheby's in 2013 to start Haus of Bavaria, I made a single promise to myself: no piece would enter the warehouse that I had not watched being made, and no maker would be carried without a telephone number I could call from a Munich tram. A decade and 18,400 customers later, the network stands at twenty-three workshops — fourteen porcelain houses, five glassworks, three wooden-kitchen workshops, and one textile room — and every one of them is a fourth- or fifth-generation family business.

"Fourth generation" is a phrase that gets thrown around loosely in our industry. Here it means something precise: the current principal learned the craft at the bench beside a parent or grandparent who signed the same invoices in the same village fifty years ago. It means a single workshop in Oberammergau that has carved wooden spoons in the same room since 1892. It means a porcelain atelier in Nymphenburg whose current master painter trained under her mother, who trained under her uncle, who trained under the founder in 1903.

We do not aggregate; we curate. Twenty-three is not a marketing number — it is the largest network of its kind we can maintain with weekly telephone check-ins, four buying trips a year, and a lifetime repair guarantee that requires us to actually know each piece.