Most of us buy plates twice. Once in a hurry, and once properly. This is about getting to the second set sooner.
There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes from opening a cupboard and finding the set you chose three years ago has gone shabby. A chip on the rim of the side plate. A grey scratch across the dinner plate where the knife has been. The glaze on the bowls has gone dull and slightly rough, and you cannot quite say when it happened.
None of this is bad luck. It is almost always a decision made at the point of buying, and usually a decision made about pattern when it should have been made about material.
Three materials, and what they really mean
Earthenware is fired at the lowest temperature of the three. It is porous underneath its glaze, which means the glaze is doing all the work. It is warm, often lovely, and often the cheapest thing on the shelf. It is also the most likely to chip, and once it chips, the exposed clay will take on water and stain. If you have ever seen a plate with a dark shadow creeping out from a chipped rim, that is earthenware doing what earthenware does.
Stoneware is fired hotter and denser. It is vitrified, or close to it, which means the body itself is non-porous rather than relying on the glaze to keep water out. A chipped stoneware plate is still a plate. It has weight in the hand, holds heat well, and takes a matt or speckled glaze in a way porcelain never quite manages. For most homes, most of the time, this is the answer. It is also why nearly everything we make is stoneware.
Porcelain is fired hottest and made from a finer, whiter clay. It is the strongest of the three despite feeling the most delicate, and it can be thrown thin without becoming fragile. It is what you want if you like a fine rim and a bright white ground. It is less forgiving of a heavy hand in the sink, and it shows a scratch more readily against pale glaze.
Pattern is what you notice in the shop. Glaze is what you live with.
The glaze is the whole thing
Run your thumb across the surface of a plate. A good glaze is even, without pinholes, and continues cleanly over the rim and down onto the foot. Look underneath. If the unglazed foot ring is rough and gritty, it will scratch every plate stacked beneath it, and a set can quietly destroy itself in a cupboard over a year or two.
A reactive glaze is a different proposition. The mineral speckle and the way the colour breaks over an edge is not printed on; it happens in the kiln, which is why no two pieces come out identical. The russet banding on the Lulworth plates sits a little differently on every plate in the stack. That is the point of it, and it is worth knowing before you unpack the box expecting twelve of the same thing.
Matt glazes are having a long moment, and rightly so. But a very matt, very soft glaze will mark under cutlery faster than a satin one. If you eat off your plates every day rather than twice a month, a satin or lightly speckled finish will look better for longer.
Metal marking, and why it is not damage
Those grey pencil-like lines that appear on a white plate are not scratches in the glaze. They are deposits of metal left behind by your cutlery. The plate is harder than the fork, and the fork gives way. They lift with a cream cleaner and a soft cloth in about thirty seconds. Most people live with them for years assuming the plate is ruined.
The dishwasher question, answered honestly
Almost everything sold as dishwasher safe is dishwasher safe. What ruins crockery is not the machine, it is loading it so pieces touch and knock through the cycle, and running very hot programmes with a harsh detergent tablet on repeat. Reactive glazes will shift slightly over hundreds of washes. Gold and platinum rims will not survive at all and never claim to.
How many, and of what
Buy for six, not four. Not because you host, but because two will break, and a set of four that becomes a set of two is a set you replace. Six becomes four and stays useful. It is why our dinner services come as twelve pieces rather than eight.
Beyond the plates, the honest list is shorter than most sets suggest. Dinner plates and side plates, obviously. Deep bowls that work equally for pasta, soup and cereal, which means you never need a soup bowl. And two or three larger serving pieces in something contrasting: a second material, a darker glaze, a hand-formed edge. A table set entirely from one boxed set looks like a boxed set.
Cups are the piece people get wrong most often. The mug that comes bundled with a dinner service is nearly always the wrong shape: too straight, too thin at the lip, and it goes cold in ten minutes. Buy cups separately and buy them for the drink you actually make. A low, generous form holds heat and sits properly in the hand; a saucer with a slightly organic edge stops the whole thing looking like a hotel.
A set of six you like enough to use daily is worth more than a set of twelve you keep for people who never come.
Buying to last
Choose the plainest thing you are drawn to. Pattern dates in a way that form and glaze do not, and a plain plate lets whatever you have cooked be the interesting thing on the table.
Plain does not mean plain-faced, though, and this is where people talk themselves out of something they would have loved. A scalloped rim is not a pattern. It is form, the shape of the plate itself, so it cannot go out of fashion the way a printed motif can, and it does the one thing a flat white rim cannot: it catches light and throws a soft shadow, which means the table reads as considered even when there is nothing on it. Our Scalloped Dinner Service is white and has no decoration at all. The edge is doing all the work.
Check the piece is still in production before you commit, because the ability to replace a broken plate in three years is worth more than any discount at the point of buying.
And handle it before you decide, if you possibly can. A plate that feels right in the hand, the weight, the rim, the way the glaze catches, is a plate you will reach for. That is the only test that matters in the end.
Our crockery is chosen on exactly these terms: stoneware for the everyday, restrained glazes, and shapes we expect to still be making in five years. See the collection.