Whatever your taste or budget, there is an antique or vintage dinner service for you, saysWilla Latham
The Christmas holiday offers the perfect excuse for a truly beautiful dinner party. In our busy lives, how often do we get to spend time on planning and decorating a lavish meal for friends or family? For me, it’s the best part of Christmas, and to make this year’s festive dinner truly memorable, why not serve it on a beautiful antique dinner service?
‘But I can’t put it in the dishwasher,’ I hear you cry. ‘What if I break something?’ you ask. Have no fear. Antique dinner services can be surprisingly robust and, not only that, they earn their keep for the rest of the year as a stunning decorative addition to your dresser. So, if you’ve been tempted to invest in a beautiful dinner service in the past, but concerns about care, cleaning and storage have put you off, now is the time to set aside your anxieties and take the plunge. Britain has a trove of beautiful antique and vintage porcelain dinner services, so it is not difficult to find one.
Table services have a long history here. During the Georgian period, the dinner party became a popular way for the upper classes to socialise, and when the Industrial Revolution created a new class of aspiring industrialists, they were keen to follow this trend. Dinner parties were not only gatherings of friends, but also a chance to show off wealth and gain influence; they were how business deals were made and marriages agreed, and porcelain factories got very busy in the 19th century: every self-respecting household needed both a dinner service and a dessert service. And as the dinner service had to withstand the heavy use of knives and forks, it was usually simple in design, with a huge number of plates for all the different courses. The dessert service, however, was a more elaborate affair: a highly decorated and expensive set and, unlike today, its design was entirely unrelated to the main dinner service.
Dessert is often the most memorable course at a dinner party; not only is it eaten last and therefore remembered best, but it’s also served at a stage when the wine has been flowing and tongues are loosened. The dessert course is the point at which the most interesting conversations are taking shape. Added to which, in a 19th-century room lit by candles, heavily gilded dishes would have looked stunning, reflecting the flickering candlel
