How a Swedish town is rekindling the passion for salt-glazed ceramics

One evening in early August, my fiancee, Sherry, and I found ourselves dining in the shadow of one of the towering kilns on the city’s southwest coast. Sweden. Luckily it was out of commission which made dinner much more comfortable. The former ceramics factory, where tons of coal were once burned to heat the kilns to around 2,300 degrees, is now Jumping (“Salt Halls”), a collection of restaurants, shops and galleries in the small seaside town of Höganäs.

After finishing a course of grilled langoustines brimming with saltwater flavor, a staff member led us into one of the ovens for a tour. The oven was so large that we could fit another dozen people without feeling crowded. The walls were black as midnight from generations of soot. For years, the smoke from the kilns was so thick that the people of Höganäs did not hang their laundry outdoors during the “glazing weeks”. In the 1830s, Höganäs potters began adding salt to the kilns during firing, which created an acid-resistant glaze and gave it a special luster. Beautiful and practical salt-glazed mugs, tableware and industrial products quickly spread across the continent, and Höganäs became almost as associated with pottery as Waterford, Ireland, is with crystal. But with globalization came outsourcing, and in 2008, the ovens went cold.

It seemed that ceramics were a thing of the past until 2022, when Höganäs launched an ambitious project to inspire a new generation: KKAM (which means “Ceramics, Art, Studio, Museum” in Swedish) includes a major renovation of the nearly hundred-year-old ceramics museum in hopes of making it a world-class destination. The workshop, which is located on the site of the old ceramic factory, has been expanded and now offers more classes to the public.

Sherry and I spent a weekend in Höganäs for a hands-on tour of the pottery revival. I flew to Copenhagen and took a train to Helsingborg, the gateway city to the largely rural Höganäs region. I stayed at Rusthållargården, a rustic inn that was built as a farmhouse in 1675. Perched on a hill in Arild, a small village by the sea, the 60-room hotel and former site of the royal stables offers a retreat to simple country life. On our first night in town, Sherry and I leaned into the slower pace and relaxed in our room, watching a long summer sunset burst orange over the sea.

“Cows!” I shouted. On a hill about 50 meters away, half a dozen of them were happily munching on grass. We are cities and whenever we see animals, we have to scream.

The next morning, hotel manager Christina Svennblad explained that they had let a neighboring farmer graze his cows and sheep on the hotel grounds.

“Kids love it. Plus, it saves us mowing the lawn.”

Astrid Sandberg, a ceramics instructor at KKAM, and her husband Christer Bogren, a lifelong resident of Höganäs, were our guides for our visit and took us to lunch at Ransvik Havsverandaa bistro near Mölle, which is on the site of the “Sin of Mölle”. In the late 1800s, Bogren explained, Swedes broke European social norms by allowing men and women to swim together. Soon, tourists from Berlin and Copenhagen flocked to this place by the thousands to bathe the students (albeit in full-body bathing suits). I had left my old-fashioned striped jumpsuit at home, but enjoyed a decadent lunch of skagenröra, a mayo-based shrimp Swedish salad on a fresh croissant.

Afterwards, we drove through the port of Mölle, where the popular Grand Hotel sits atop a hill, and then towards the majestic Kullens Lighthouse, which held a special place for Sandberg and Bogren.

“This is where we got married,” Sandberg explained.

I imagined how beautiful it must have been, in a glass-walled room overlooking the Kattegat, the strait that runs between Sweden and Denmark.

The next day, Sandberg and Bogren took us to the museum to get some inspiration before we started throwing clay. On the way past green landscapes, I saw countless Keramik signs, indicating a small ceramics studio or showroom. Sandberg said that Helena Petersson, the owner of the small Arilds Hamnfik cafe in Arild, was a frequent visitor to the KKAM studio, where he made the cups in which he served his coffee. Mölle Krukmakersa popular restaurant near the harbor in Mölle, it doubles as a local pottery shop. In Höganäs, pottery is everywhere.

At the museum, I entered a room filled with sunlight that showed the progression of Höganäs style from the 1800s to the present day. The striking centerpiece of the room was a display of Höganäs krus, with signature two-handled jugs arranged from tiny to massive. Walking through the halls, we saw the works of historically influential Swedish ceramists such as Åke Holm, as well as contemporary artists including Jens Fänge. When I left, I was truly inspired.

The problem: I didn’t know the first thing about making ceramics and I was always terrible in art class. But Sandberg assured me that wouldn’t be a problem at all. She showed us around the KKAM studio, which had recently expanded from its humble beginnings with just two pottery wheels to a sprawling complex with 22 wheels, workspaces, classrooms and a firing room. The atmosphere was lively and welcoming and I found out that the open studio classes were so popular that it was hard to book a place. We met a professional artist who was showing her work at the museum, as well as a local hobbyist who had rented a studio space for a few weeks during her stay.

In our classroom, sleek metal overhead lights illuminated a long butcher block with five potter’s wheels. As we each sat down, Sandberg put us at ease, joking and finding the perfect pedagogical tone—encouraging without infantilizing. She demonstrated how to center the clay on the wheel, wet it, scoop out a base and roll it out to form the walls of a pot. When my clay started to wobble, she showed me how to settle it by pinching the top of the wall.

As my creation became more bowl-like, I began to feel comfortable and Sandberg suggested that I “follow the clay.” Just an hour earlier, this would have sounded like half-baked Zen. But standing in front of the spinning wheel, it made perfect sense. For nearly two centuries, people had pursued clay in this very spot; the clay knew where to go. My hands moved across the wet, smooth gray wall and I soon found myself staring at a bowl—an actual thing one could use in a kitchen without embarrassment.

I was feeling pretty good about myself until I saw that Bogren had already finished two bowls and was putting the finishing touches on a real Höganäs krus.

“I took a pottery class in fifth grade,” he explained sheepishly.

“It’s terribly annoying,” Sandberg said with a laugh. “But he was born here. And if you’re from Höganäs, pottery is in your blood.”

A version of this story first appeared in the October 2024 issue of Travel + leisure under the title “Breaking the Mold.”