Station: [14] Reichmann Pottery

F: Ocean – tangerine – blueberry or apple: the Reichmann pottery's colour combinations open up worlds of the imagination. What's called for here is a talent for mixing and matching.

The pottery offers brightly coloured, elegantly pastel, or plain white tableware with unglazed elements in glistening gold. And of course the traditional blue and white. Thanks to the simple shapes and pale colours, everything can be combined with everything else to form a new whole.

M: For five generations, the Reichmann family of potters have been based at Töpfergasse 24. They live, work and sell their wares, all in the same place. If you enter the site by way of the residential building by the road, you'll see an elongated courtyard, the former barn and, at the end of the garden, the workshops with the room housing the potter's wheels and the kiln – a layout that for centuries has proven to be ideal for a pottery.

F: And that layout didn't come about by chance. The kiln was as far away as possible, right at the other end of the courtyard. Some places even had a complete ban on pottery kilns inside the town walls to minimise the risk of a fire spreading.

In Bürgel, they came up with a compromise. The potters were allowed to work inside the town walls, where they were protected, but had to move as far as possible towards the outskirts. In the case of the Reichmann family, the medieval town wall is actually part of the rear building, the one that cuts across the property.

M: The earliest member of the Reichmann family of potters was Albin, who took over the workshop on the 1st of October 1900 from a master potter called Füchsel. It was on the northern edge of town at the time. Albin was succeeded by his son Arthur, who handed over to his son Herbert, who in turn passed the business to his son Günter. He handed it over to his daughter Anne on the 1st of October 2020.

Anne works on this historic site alongside her husband, her sister and her brother-in-law. Her parents, Günter and Bettina Reichmann, continue to provide support. As a team and a family, they run one of Bürgel's oldest and most innovative potteries.