Royal Copenhagen

Plenty of people know the royal porcelain with three blue waves on the bottom, but not everyone pictures the shop that has been selling it for more than a hundred years. The Royal Copenhagen flagship takes up a whole building on Amagertorv square, right in the thick of the Strøget pedestrian street, and with the sheer amount of porcelain and art objects in it, it feels more like a museum.

The Royal Copenhagen manufactory was founded in 1775 under royal patronage, and the three waves in its mark stand for the Danish straits. The main pattern for the tableware was created straight away and has never been taken out of production since, so you can buy a new plate for an old set even twenty years later. The famous local painting goes onto the porcelain before firing, under the glaze, so it is not afraid of knives, forks or dishwashers.

An interesting detail: the versions of the sets differ in the shape of the edges, and the price grows along with the complexity of that shape. Plain plates have a smooth edge, the pricier version has a lace border painted along the rim, and on the grandest one the lace is cut out by hand.

You can put together anything here, from a single mug to a set for a dozen people. By the way, the mugs, bowls and small dishes of the relatively cheap Mega series will survive a flight in a suitcase better than the rest. Mega differs from the traditional series by its blown up pattern: the same drawing is enlarged so much that one curl and half a flower fit on a mug.

Christmas plates have become a special Royal Copenhagen tradition, and they have been released every year since 1908. If you feel like it, you can find a plate from your birth year or from the year you got married. Besides tableware they also make porcelain figurines, vases and Christmas tree ornaments here.

On the top price floor of the brand sits the Flora Danica series, with motifs from the botanical atlas of Danish wild flora. These pieces are painted by hand and traced with gold along the rim, and no two objects in the set are ever the same. But there is one thing worth knowing without illusions: most Royal Copenhagen tableware is produced at the company's own factory in Thailand, and only Flora Danica and personalised pieces are painted by hand in Denmark.

Three marks are put on the bottom of every piece: three blue waves, the royal crown with the words Royal Copenhagen and the artist's signature. Take a close look at the initials, because some artists have their own fans who wait until that particular hand paints them that particular plate. And the year a piece was made is encoded by a line above or below one of the letters of Royal Copenhagen, so even forty years later, when you turn a plate or a mug over, you will remember the year you bought it here.