DAVID WALTERS DINNER SETS

In a world of excellent chefs in competing restaurants, good presentation and fine tableware are paramount. This is why the dinner sets of three of South Africa’s top restaurants in Franschhoek have all been fashioned by porcelain master David Walters, one of the country's most distinguished potters formerly based in KwaZulu-Natal and the founder and driving force behind the Midlands Meander.

Two years ago David Walters began working with some of the Cape’s top chefs to create bespoke porcelain pieces that would enhance their particular style of cooking.

David Higgs of Rust en Vrede near Stellenbosch, recently voted top restaurant in the country, was one of the first to appreciate the value of consulting with an original craftsman he admired to achieve a good partnership between his superbly conceived food and the plates and bowls on which it is presented. In the generous spirit that exists between master craftsmen, Higgs urges his interested restaurant guests to visit his namesake’s Ceramics Studio, and as a result Walters has made and exported five dinner services to Europe in the past two months.

The other two top-three restaurants, Jordan Wine Estate and The Tasting Room at Le Quartier Francais, also use some of Walters’ bespoke dinnerware.

David Walters’ fingers have spent nearly 40 years creating beautiful vessels out of lumps of clay, and visitors can watch the transformation as he works in his studio behind a series of elegant showrooms in one of Franschhoek’s oldest houses, which now also houses the Ceramics Gallery.

He also produces stand-alone porcelain pieces, reduction-fired stoneware, porcelain domestic ware and original artworks, as well as raku and smoke-fired pieces and colourful slumped glass. Very occasionally, in the less-busy winter months, he conducts master classes for potters who want to refine their craft.

The Ceramics Gallery is a family enterprise. He met his wife Michelle when they studied Fine Arts together at university in Pietermaritzburg. “We’re a team and we live above the shop,” said Walters. Across the garden with its stately trees, their daughter Sarah, a qualified sculptor, has her own studio. Their work is displayed in the Gallery, one of the lesser-known special destinations in the heart of Franschhoek.

Walters is a fellow of the potters’ association Ceramics Southern Africa, and an icon of the Cape Craft and Design Institute (CCDI). After they had both graduated, he and Michelle established the Nkwaleni Pottery in Hilton, Natal, before moving on to renovate and establish a new pottery at Caversham Mill in Lidgetton.

After a decade in England during the 90s, where they established The Particular Pottery in an old Baptist Chapel (and David became Vice Chairman of the Suffolk Craft Society), the call of Africa became too strong to resist. They came home to face the new challenge of transforming the derelict Victorian mansion that belonged to Franschhoek’s first teacher in the 1840s into the Ceramics Gallery.

The Ceramics Gallery is at 24 Dirkie Uys Street, Franschhoek. For more information phone 021 876 4304 or email info@davidwalters.co.za