Herend Porcelain

Herend has been making porcelain in the same village north of Balaton since 1826, and the firm's reputation was made at the London Great Exhibition of 1851, where Queen Victoria ordered a service in a pattern of butterflies and peonies that is still produced and still called Victoria. The house style is hand-painted and unapologetically ornate: the pierced fishnet decoration, Chinese-inspired patterns, animal figures built from thousands of applied scales, and dinner services that take days each to decorate. The visitor side consists of a museum of historic pieces and a mini-manufactory where throwers, modellers and painters work at benches behind glass and will talk about what they are doing.

What you actually see

• The mini-manufactory - painters and modellers working at benches you can stand beside.
• The fishnet pieces - the pierced lattice decoration cut by hand before firing.
• The Victoria pattern - butterflies and peonies, in production since the 1850s.
• The museum - historic services, figures and exhibition pieces from two centuries.

When to go

The workshop only runs on working days, so a weekday visit is essential if you want to see anything being made; weekends give you the museum and the shop and little else. Closed on some public holidays. Mornings are better, as the demonstration benches wind down in the afternoon. Two to three hours covers museum, workshop and shop.

Honest expectations

This is a company visitor centre and the route ends in a shop where the pricing is serious money. The mini-manufactory is a demonstration set up for visitors rather than the real production line. Beyond the first ten minutes it is dull for children. Herend is off the main routes and needs a car or a slow bus from Veszprem. Photography is restricted in parts of the workshop.

Nearby

Veszprem's castle quarter is a short drive east, with Balaton beyond it.