“As kindred spirits, the Artek and Heath Pottery The teams came together again to combine our respective crafts,” says Marianne Goebl, CEO of Artek. “Designed as a system, the Tile Table collection encourages play and experimentation with color and texture. The results are, we believe, delightful functional companions for the home.”
The renewed collection – a first edition of which debuted in 2026 – is presented in a trio of signature colors: green, white and now terracotta red. The latter aligns well with an industry-wide return to moody tones and oh-so-light art deco embellishments. According to the two companies, this third addition causes the clay to become clear. The wood is minimally processed.
This expansive proposal—the amalgamation of the skillfully proportional and tonal times of the historic ceramist Edith Heath and the still-iconic Table Sqaure of the polymath Alvaro Alto—is not just aesthetic. The practical — durable and even hygienic — application of fully glazed ceramic tiles as a table finish cannot be ignored. Just think of the highly efficient and economical kitchen countertops of the 1990s, which have since been replaced by equally durable but significantly more expensive natural stones.
What this union of these forces ultimately represents is the skillful mirror of values. Both heritage boutique producers rarely deviate from the central principles of beauty, utility, integrity and longevity. Often the new releases are renditions of long-appreciated classics that transcend time without necessarily becoming “timeless.”
These fresh elements tend to hold fast a long-standing, underlying understanding of concise form-finding and decisive style that has yet to be overcome. And any hint of a national or regional performance—what might be described as a Finnish and Californian design—is hard to decipher. The nods to their separate physical settings are implicit, at best. These cleverly shaped and finished designs are emphatically universal, alluring viscerally as well as visually.
Where other name-brand collaborations lean bombastic and gimmicky, this collaboration makes sense. “What keeps us coming back to this (project) with Artek is a shared reverence for natural materials – clay, glaze and wood – and how they respond to use over time,” says Heath Clay Studio director Tung Chiang. “It’s a creative exchange and a close friendship, rooted in a mutual love of thoughtful creation.”
An added bonus: the Artek + Heath chess table. Although the brand traces its roots to this ingenious application as a call back to the Max Ernst chess table at Villa Mairea—designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto, this cleverly unexpected second application seems to have arisen naturally from the cohesion of tile and table typologies—a makeshift game board with files of segmental tiles that double as a chessboard. To mark the moment, ceramic chess pieces were imagined to be thrown by hand and by hand, in accordance with the philosophy described earlier. The patterning possibilities are seemingly endless.
To learn more about the brands participating in this dynamic partnership, visit artek.fi and heathceramics.com.
Photo courtesy of Heath Ceramics.
