Feats of Clay : The De Carbonnels Toured France and Came Back With a Pottery Factory
Benjamin Disraeli, who was a best-selling novelist before he became Queen Victoria’s favorite prime minister, said: “When I want to read a good book, I write one.”
When French aristocrat Charles de Carbonnel and his Californian wife, Katrina, could not find suitable wedding presents for their friends in Beverly Hills, they bought a French pottery factory and started making some. They make large, cream-colored pieces in the 18th-Century tradition, such as tulip-holders and big serving platters decorated with coats of arms and interlaced initials. They are poised for an assault on the American market.
The De Carbonnels had toured France this summer, looking for the best place to get old, beautiful pieces copied. One factory they found was Geo. Martel in the village of Devre, Brittany, about 15 minutes inland by car from Boulogne. It had been making faience (earthenware) since the 1890s but had fallen on hard times.
“The people at Martel kept putting off our appointments,” Katrina de Carbonnel recalls, “and finally they said: ‘The reason we keep putting you off is that we’re going bankrupt; and we’re being sold at auction in one month.”’ Charles de Carbonnel showed up at the auction. Nobody else attended, so the couple managed to acquire the factory at a reasonable price.
“The only time in France when you can make a factory work again when it’s going badly--to fire people and so on,” Katrina de Carbonnel says, “is when you buy it up after it has gone bankrupt. Martel never stopped production. We reduced the work force from 80 to 60 people, and we were able to improve everything that needed to be improved--kilns, potters’ wheels, shelves and morale. And now we’re working so well, and we sold so much at a recent fair in Paris, that already we are paying overtime wages, and soon we shall have to begin rehiring.”
Katrina de Carbonnel’s previous career was as a picture restorer. She was the first American to be allowed to work as a restorer at the Louvre. She was born in Palos Verdes, the land of which her grandfather, Frank V. Vanderlip, bought and her father, Kelvin Coxe Vanderlip, developed. Her father died when she was 4, but she remembers something of his high life style.
“He was a Ranchero, one of an exclusive California group that gets together and goes on long rides without women. In those days they would go with their cooks and butlers, riding and singing. The group included Hernando Courtright (of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel), the architect Cliff May and my godfather, John Green, who now lives in Santa Barbara. Cliff May also flew a little airplane, and he had a small piano. He’d put it in the plane and they’d play it in the plane. We used to go up to Lake Arrowhead, and my father would commute to work in Los Angeles by water-skis; my mother would drive a speedboat and he would water-ski across Lake Arrowhead; then they’d be picked up and driven to the office.”
The Vanderlips were promoting the Palos Verdes peninsula, so they held giant costume parties, aglitter with film stars. “If my mother told my father, ‘I’m building the Eiffel Tower on the tennis court,’ he’d say, ‘How nice. Will the can-can girls be there?’ ” Katrina de Carbonnel recalled. Charles Laughton lived just below the Vanderlip villa. “He terrified me,” Katrina says. “Mother told us that he didn’t like children, so that when we ran down to the stables, we would run big circles around his house.”
When Katrina’s father died in 1956, her mother took her and her brother to Switzerland. The children went to “a fantastic little boarding school, called Chalet Marie-Jose, that doesn’t exist any more. It was started in 1912 for the Belgian royal family’s children. ‘The Sound of Music’ was corny compared to this school. The girls were on the top floor, and the boys were on the next floor. We skied two hours a day and hiked.” Katrina then spent three further years in a Paris school. When she returned to California, to attend Palos Verdes High School, she found herself rather out of place.
“The school was only 3 years old at the time, but it already had 2,000 students. I was very European and even had a slight accent in English; I wore knee socks and a kilt. In the high school, you either had to know all about football and be rah-rah or be far out into drugs, and I was neither, so I was miserable there.” Her mother refused to let her go back to Europe, “so we compromised, and I went to a school on the East Coast, Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Conn., the school that Jacqueline Kennedy went to.”
Katrina proceeded to Cornell University--”a nice culture shock”--and during summer vacations worked for Pat Reeves, restoring textiles at the L.A. County Museum of Art. “She got me interested in restoration, and before long I knew that picture restoring was what I wanted to do. It’s nice to know what you want to do at 19; most people struggle on for ages.” She studied chemistry and art history; spent her junior year working on paintings at the Pitti Palace, Florence, and got into graduate school at Harvard--”a very small art-conservation program, there were only two in my class--David Kolch who later became a restorer at the L.A. County Museum, and myself.” Then she obtained a Kress Foundation grant to work in the Louvre for a year.
“And I managed to sneak a second year at the Louvre. I was the first American to work there, and they were worried at first because there had been a lot of controversy between the American method of picture cleaning (very scientific and flat on a table) and the European method (very aesthetic, on an easel, and leaving as much varnish as possible.) But, luckily, I had worked in Italy with European restorers, and I spoke fluent French, so they didn’t treat me as an American. One advantage is that French people don’t know I’m American until I tell them. I never wrote a letter in English until I was 14--and I still spell terribly.”
The courtship of Charles and Katrina was not what you’d call a whirlwind romance. They met at a party in Switzerland in 1976. They talked, and she did not see him for three years, by which time he was doing his French service as a steward in the French Air Force. He would fly to Tahiti and Djibouti, with four-day stopovers in Los Angeles, staying in a hotel paid for by the French Government. The only person he could remember knowing in Los Angeles was Katrina, so he made a telephone call to her home from Paris. Katrina was at Harvard graduate school at the time. Her mother answered the telephone and invited De Carbonnel to the house. “And he simply charmed her--did her grocery shopping and cooked superb meals,” Katrina recalls. “Before long, he was visiting more regularly, and Mother was saying, you have to marry him; and I didn’t dare admit to her that I couldn’t remember who he was. Then, my younger sister met him and said that I had to marry him; and my sister and my mother have different tastes, so if they both agreed on it . . . . Well, when I finally met him again, I turned beet red and . . . it worked.”
Charles de Carbonnel has been working on the Geo. Martel faience factory at night and during vacations, as he has a full-time job as a consultant for Strategic Planning Associates, a Washington-based firm which tells Fortune 500 companies how to manage their affairs. He studied business at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined Strategic Planning Associates when it had a staff of only eight. During the four years that he and Katrina lived in Washington, the staff grew to 150. Charles was sent to Geneva to open a Geneva office. “We were the only people in Geneva for a year; now the office is booming and has 20 people,” Katrina says. The couple live in Geneva most of the year. They rent a chalet that was built for a mid-19th-Century exhibition, “so it’s all curlicues.” At the turn of the century, the chalet belonged to a botanist who planted a forest of California sequoia trees. The De Carbonnels’ children, Charles Eric, 4, and Alissa, 2, are rapidly becoming bilingual.
Charles and Katrina have spent two “working vacations” at the French factory. “The men treat us as a life-savers,” Katrina says. “My husband has done most of the work. He’s a businessman, and it has been complicated understanding all the French legal ramifications in buying a company going bankrupt. I’m just going in and doing the fun part now--the choice of designs. Being American, it’s easier for me to have American taste than for Charles.” Katrina is also planning to set up an American home sales network--”not like Tupperware, but . . . you might have a friend whom you could call up when you wanted to buy a wedding present.”
Katrina is fascinated by the collection of 6,000 old molds at the factory. They include sphinxes with the face of Louis XV’s mistress, Mme. du Barry. But the factory’s main products for the next few years will be service plates or buffet plates larger than 12 inches in diameter or (in the case of oval plates) length; “and for California, we’re making them with matching cachepots that you will put your flats right in--perfect for ladies’ luncheons and parties. There are much plainer plates to go with them, with just a simple border. Those cost $20 to $25; the larger service plates cost between $50 and $70. Wedding-type plates can cost from $200 to $600 and up, depending on how elaborate the design is. You can go up to $1,000 if you like.”
(The larger decorative pieces may be ordered from Comtesse de Libran’s store Voyage en France, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. 92067. For made-to-order service plates: Vanya Rohner’s store, Foster-Ingersoll, 805 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles 90069. For general information: Christina Vanderlip (Mrs. Henrik Vanderlip), 122 East 82nd St., New York, N.Y. 10028, telephone (212) 879-7034.)
