Famed for his sleek yet exquisite perfume flacons, as well as occasional excursions into the theatre world, Peter Schmidt has now turned his gaze, as always attuned to essentials, toward the field of porcelain. Over the decades, exceptional designs have emerged in Germany again and again on this terrain, including Trude Petri’s Urbino service and TAC 1 by Walter Gropius, to name but two examples. Schmidt as well, a master of simplicity, bases his service – how could it be otherwise? – on geometric shapes. The interesting thing about it, though, is how he puts these graphic building blocks together: namely with relatively large “soft” radii as well as an ambivalent relationship of circle and rectangle. While the cups and pots have a cylindrical form, the saucières, bowls and sugar and jam jars are flat cubes with strongly rounded corners. A striking element because it’s so unusual is that in the plates and platters Schmidt has set a rectangle inside a circle. This creates edges of varying widths, which makes the design complex and lively despite a clearly ordered structure. As is often the case in tableware, the pots are at the heart of the design. In this case, the pot ascends to the status of tabletop monolith. The fact that the choice of geometric figures is not mere random formal play is shown by the base of the bowls, which fit into the recesses in the plates. This results in diverse combination options.