Breaking the Mold

A Swedish town once famous for its saltglazed ceramics is having a renaissance. Johannes Lichtman gets behind the wheel.

- Johannes Lichtman

ON AN EVENING in early August, my fiancée, Sherry, and I found ourselves dining in the shadow of one of the towering kilns on the southwestern coast of Sweden. Happily, it was out of commission, which made dinner much more comfortable. The former ceramics factory, where tons of coal were once burned to heat the furnaces to some 2,300 degrees, is now the Salthallarna ("Salt Halls"), a collection of restaurants, shops, and galleries in the small seaside town of Höganäs.

After we finished a course of grilled langoustines bursting with saltwater flavor, a staff member led us inside one of the kilns for a tour. The oven was so big we could have fit a dozen more people without feeling crowded. The walls were midnight-black from generations of soot. For years, the smoke from the ovens was so thick that the people of Höganäs wouldn't hang their laundry outdoors during "glazing weeks." In the 1830s, the ceramists of Höganäs started adding salt to the kilns during firing, which created an acid-resistant glaze and gave it a special shine. The beautiful and practical salt-glazed mugs, tableware, and industrial goods quickly spread across the continent, and Höganäs became almost as associated with ceramics as Waterford, Ireland, is with crystal. But with globalization came outsourcing, and in 2008, the kilns went cold.

It looked like ceramics were a thing of the past until 2022, when Höganäs launched an ambitious project to inspire a new generation: KKAM (which in Swedish stands for "Ceramics, Art, Studio, Museum") includes a major renovation of the nearly hundred-year-old ceramics museum, in hopes of making it a world-class destination. The studio that sits on the site of the old ceramics factory was expanded, and now offers more classes for the public.