Hüttl Porcelain Factory, Budapest - Óbuda

In 1865, Tivadar Hüttl (1841–1910) took over control of the company that his father Ede Hüttl (1811–1872) had founded in 1854. Ede Hüttl and his wife Mária Katalin Bayer (1811–1893) moved with their children from Elbogen in Bohemia (now Loket, Czechia) to Budapest to set up the Hungarian depot of the Haidinger brothers’ porcelain works in Elbogen. Having thus started by selling imported porcelain, they later set up a small porcelain glazing workshop that decorated imported white ware to a high standard, earning the appreciation of the industry and the public.

In 1883, Tivadar Hüttl moved the family porcelain glazing workshop from Zrínyi Street to Aradi Street, where he was granted a licence to set up a kiln. In the same year, he was granted the title of purveyor to the imperial and royal court, and he also opened a shop and warehouse in the Lloyd Palace (designed by József Hild) in Dorottya Street. This sold a very wide range of prestigious and elegant wares and did very good business. The Hüttl company mainly made functional wares – sets for the table, the bathroom, cafés and restaurants – and applied monograms and coats of arms on table services. They also assembled trousseaus and made replacements for broken or missing items of porcelain sets. From 1903 onwards, these orders were completed in the new porcelain works in Jász Street.

In 1904, the Hüttl works was awarded a prestigious order from King Franz Joseph I to extend and remake pieces of the 4500-item porcelain table service for the Royal Castle of Buda. The original order in 1870 had been granted to Mór Fischer’s porcelain works in Herend: services for the royal family, the officer corps and the staff, all bearing the royal monogram of Franz Joseph and designs scarlet with three basic motifs – gold laurel leaves, the Waldstein pattern, and simple geometric patterns. To fulfil this order, Hüttl moved his porcelain works to a new site in Óbuda in 1906, raising the company’s productivity with a high-volume coal-fired round kiln and modernised machinery and processes.

In the 1890s, Tivadar Hüttl took on his nephew Frigyes Hüttl (1869–1939), who carried out experiments leading to two patents for porcelain decoration techniques. A patent for the durable metal enamel technique, involving a galvanisation process, with an effect similar to silver-coloured platinum decoration, was filed in 1901. This was followed, in 1911, by the patent for porcelain made with pink underglaze and bright pink slip, which was given the commercial name Couleur Rosé Hüttl, marked on the wares. In addition to these innovations, the ornaments and functional ware designed by the eminent applied artists Pál Horti and Lajos Kozma indicate the standing of the Hüttl works in the early 20th century.

Frigyes Hüttl led the company after Tivadar died in 1910, but subsequently left following a family dispute. In 1927, Frigyes joined a porcelain dealers Ignác Bán and Géza Mihalik in a business they had been founded in 1913. Its premises were in the Haas Palace in Vörösmarty Square, and the company was from then on called “Hüttl, Bán és Mihalik”.

The Hüttl family firm was nationalised in 1951 and continued as “Aquincum Porcelángyár”, the Óbuda factory of the Fővárosi Művészi Kézműves Vállalat (Budapest Artistic Crafts Company). The factory finally closed in 1991.