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Kale on a dinner plate sounds like the setup to a bad joke. But walk into almost any French country kitchen — or ours, here in Nelson — and you'll find cabbage leaves rendered in glazed ceramic, stacked on open shelving like they belong there. Because they do. This is Bordallo Pinheiro, and the story behind it is one of our favourites to tell.
Bordallo Pinheiro was founded in 1884 in Caldas da Rainha, a spa town on Portugal's Silver Coast known for its thermal springs and its clay. The man behind the name, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, wasn't a potter by trade — he was a caricaturist and satirist, famous for lampooning Portuguese high society in newspapers of the day. When he turned his hand to ceramics, he brought that same irreverent wit with him, along with a deep love of the natural world he'd grown up around: vegetable patches, orchards, the creatures that lived in them.
That combination — technical skill borrowed from painting and caricature, subject matter borrowed from the kitchen garden — is what makes Bordallo Pinheiro instantly recognisable. No other ceramic house does naturalism quite like this.
The cabbage — or "couve," the leafy green central to Portuguese cooking — was a humble, everyday ingredient. Rendering it in fine, hand-finished ceramic and putting it at the centre of the table was Bordalo Pinheiro's quiet joke about what we choose to elevate and what we don't. Over a century later, that joke has become one of the most collected tableware designs in the world. Each piece is still hand-painted and relief-moulded in Portugal, which is why no two are ever quite identical — small variations in the glaze and leaf veining are part of the charm, not a flaw.
If you're new to Bordallo Pinheiro, resist the urge to buy a full dinner service on day one. The pieces are designed to be collected slowly and mixed with what you already own — that's very much the French country way of doing a table, layering pattern and texture rather than matching everything.
A good entry point is a small Cabbage Leaf Bowl for nuts, olives or condiments, or a single Cabbage Plate in the 19cm size, which works just as well as a side plate for cheese and crackers as it does propped on a shelf. From there, most of our customers build outward — a charger for special occasions, a bowl for the fruit that's always sitting on the bench anyway, and eventually a full setting for the table.
Bordallo Pinheiro has also collaborated with names outside ceramics — most notably supermodel Claudia Schiffer, whose Gudrun collection draws on memories of autumn leaves gathered in her family's garden. It's a softer, more painterly take on the same naturalist DNA, and it sits beautifully alongside the classic cabbage pieces rather than competing with them. The Grove Pheasant Plate is another favourite for the same reason — countryside imagery, hand-finished, entirely at home on a French country table.
We're one of only a handful of stockists of Bordallo Pinheiro in New Zealand, and it's one of the ranges we're proudest to bring into the shop. It photographs beautifully, it holds up to daily use, and — perhaps most importantly — it's the kind of thing people genuinely get excited about when they spot it on the shelf. If you've read our guide to French Provincial vs French Country style, you'll know that country style is the one built on warmth, imperfection and things with a story. Bordallo Pinheiro is that philosophy, glazed and fired.
We also use pieces from the range regularly in our table styling — you can see it in action in The Art of the French Table.
You can browse the full range, including current stock levels, in our Bordallo Pinheiro collection — or come and see it in person at 62 Montgomery Square, Nelson, where we're always happy to talk you through how the pieces mix and layer.
