The Circa EditThe Circa Edit: 10 Lots for a Los Angeles House
Our specialists pick ten lots from the current sale against a brief every designer in this city recognises: hard light, open plan, doors that stay open.
1922–2006
Vallauris ceramist who pressed tile into furniture, making coffee tables whose tops are glazed and fired rather than veneered.
Why they matter
Capron studied applied arts in Paris and moved to Vallauris in 1946, co-founding the Atelier Callis with Robert Picault and Jean Derval. In 1952 he took over an abandoned pottery and built his own works, which grew to around a hundred and twenty people by 1980 and took the gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1954.
The idea was simple and nobody had done it at that scale: set hand-glazed stoneware tiles into a table and let the ceramic do the work the wood usually does. The Garrigue and Herbier tables, made from roughly 1968, use tiles impressed with real leaves gathered from the scrub above Vallauris, which burn away in the kiln and leave a print like a fossil.
Cheap imitations circulated in his own lifetime and helped close the factory in 1982. Genuine tops have depth in the glaze and visible variation from tile to tile.
Available now
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Garrigue coffee table
- Herbier coffee table
- Tiled side table
- Ceramic lamp base
- Wall plaque
- Glazed vase
Materials
- Glazed stoneware
- Ceramic tile
- Pine
- Wrought iron
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- Look on the underside or the reverse for a stamped or incised Capron Vallauris, sometimes only Capron, occasionally with France added for export.
- Work from before 1952 can carry the Callis mark instead, from the workshop he shared with Robert Picault and Jean Derval.
- On Garrigue and Herbier tops every leaf impression should be individual, with the glaze pooling differently in each print; repeated identical motifs mean a mould-made copy.
- Imitators were active while the factory was still running, so a period-looking unmarked tile table is not automatically a Capron.
- Fired tile is hard, so chips and grout loss are common and honest; frames were often refinished and that matters less than the top.
Past Circa results
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