Orriule — The workshop

Preserving a living place

Orriule is not just a story: it's a real place, with its kilns, machines, workshops, walls — and a family memory. When an artisanal activity spans several decades, the challenge is not just producing: it's also maintaining, repairing, and sometimes reinventing itself so the place continues to exist.

At Poterie de la Colombe, this continuity has been achieved in stages: preserving know-how, protecting the building, maintaining production tools, and preparing for the moment when clay becomes central again.

Production tools

The workshop preserves part of its original equipment: wheels, kilns, molds, shaping tools. Some machines date from the 1970s and still work.

It's this tooling, maintained and sometimes adapted, that makes it possible today to envision a resumption of artisanal production — respecting the gestures and constraints that have always defined the quality of the pieces.

Renovate and protect

The workshop buildings require constant maintenance. Roof, walls, floors, electrical installations — each season brings its share of work.

Protecting the place also means protecting what it contains: archives, glaze recipes, historical molds, reference pieces — everything that constitutes the living heritage of Poterie de la Colombe.

Return to clay

The goal is clear: to bring Poterie de la Colombe back to life, not as a memory, but as a creative workshop — faithful to its history and fully anchored in the present.

• Rework the pigments
• Resume the iconic forms
• Restart artisanal production — especially in Chinese blue

Workshop visit

The workshop is a workplace. To preserve the production rhythm, visits are by appointment only.