The Workshop

Once you leave the showroom to the back, passing the old „Toxicarium“ (poison cabinet) you climb a small staircase to the basement, which is rather a lowered ground-floor. Here you enter the workshop, with lots of space and light and the ceiling still more than 3m high - also stuccoed!

All the ceramics of Kühn Keramik get produced in this small workshop installed in the old laboratory of the more than 120 year old pharmacy. Water comes out of the tap, clay from Westerwald, glaze from Meissen and the motifs printed in a small workshop in Selb, the very center of German porcelain production. Numerous steps of work now have to be executed in order to create a cup out of these raw materials. The team, an international mixture from Germany, Netherlands and Georgia, forms the cups, beakers, handles, bowls and decorative pieces with their hands. They roll out the clay like a dough, cut out the pieces and form them with a mold. They leave their finger prints on the clay, these prints will show later on each cup. The ceramics get not thrown or poured into a mold in order to have always individual pieces. Not one is a copy of the other.

Fired for the first time the bisque comes out of the oven. It is an intermediary, rather fragile stage before the piece gets a coating of glaze applied and is then fired again. This now is a firing at 1100°C and that results in a much stronger and solid article - thus the pieces are even dishwascher safe! A third and fourth burning applies the motifs, gold, silver, platinum and all other specialties of Bernhard Kühn - these parts of the finishing make the ceramic pieces rather sensitive to the dishwasher.