West Germany: Rosenthal’s New Look

To more than three generations of housewives around the world, the name Rosenthal meant German china with rococo curlicues and baroque designs. Nowadays, would-be buyers do a double take over the clean, contemporary simplicity of Rosenthal porcelain, which has taken the play away from Wedgwood to become the largest-selling quality china imported into the U.S. from Europe. Rosenthal plans to set up its own self-contained china units at stores throughout the U.S., recently opened one at Manhattan’s Altman’s and plans to open nine more before year’s end.

Back to Selb. More than the patterns have changed at Rosenthal. With sales last year of $20.6 million. Rosenthal proudly claims that it is the world’s largest china “publisher.” Founded in 1879, the company was taken away from Philipp Rosenthal in 1938 when the Nazis “Aryanized” German industry. His son Philip, then a student at Oxford, renounced his German citizenship. When war came, he joined the Foreign Legion, ultimately linked up with British intelligence and became a British subject. After the war, young Rosenthal, now 46, returned to the company’s headquarters in the Bavarian village of Selb, found that one of the men who had forced out his father was still running the firm. Philip sued, in 1950 won 6% of the company’s shares, a seat on the board and a job as advertising director.

Once inside, Philip began to steer the company away from making “pompous imitations of the past.” Carefully selecting artists whose works span the spectrum of contemporary design, he recruited Raymond Loewy, France’s Raymond Peynet. Finland’s Tapio Wirkkala, and Germany’s Hans Theo Baumann. From their designs the company produced its simple, elegant Studio Line. As the Studio Line’s sales rose, so did Philip’s influence in the company; in 1958 he became president. Though he has kept a good many older patterns for nostalgic buyers, the Studio Line now accounts for 67% of Rosenthal porcelain sales. Among Studio Line patrons are Elizabeth Taylor. Audrey Hepburn, the Shah of Iran, the Begum Aga

Khan, Thailand’s Queen Sirikit and Belgium’s Queen Fabiola.

Eating on Ladders. In ten years, Rosenthal has quadrupled its production, now has eight dinnerware, two glassware, and eight technical factories employing 9,360 people. Philip Rosenthal is planning to build a new $4,000,000 plant in Selb, but intends to keep his office in a converted factory building, where he can maintain its rumpus-room atmosphere and his collection of rejected porcelain models and toy monkeys. Intense and charming, Philip dresses like a tattered English country squire, lives in a manor house whose living room has a copper floor and a ceiling made of floor boards. He runs two miles home to lunch to keep in shape for mountain climbing. Says one baffled Rosenthal executive: “I guess he is really a British eccentric.” Rosenthal s fourth wife Lavinia, a London socialite, is no less so.

When Sweden’s Count Bernadotte came to dinner one evening during one of the frequent remodelings of the Rosenthal manor. Lavinia set the table on a high scaffold. The guests sat precariously eight feet above the floor—eating, naturally, off Rosenthal china.