Hermès' Natures Marines tableware is a botanical marvel

At Paris Design Week, Hermès presented their new porcelain table service: dubbed Natures Marines, the 34-piece collection made its debut inside an old carpentry workshop on a tidal landscape formed of sand on the cement floor.

For this tableware collection, Hermès’ Artistic Directors of Home Universe Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry turned to Brighton-trained and London-based illustrator Katie Scott, who imagined a marine landscapes beneath the sea.

Discover Hermès' Natures Marines

Four years in the making, the original brief was broadly referencing marine life, but the artist narrowed the focus down to only sea plants, after visiting the marine herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum – a collection dating back to the 17th century of more than 60,000 dried marine algae specimens. It was there that Scott got to study algae, seaweeds and other marine life, pressed into books like flowers, and the way some seaweed samples were ‘as long as a room’ once unfolded from the books, inspired the way Scott drew them and eventually placed them on the porcelain shapes.

Working originally with pen on paper, Scott’s sketches were then scanned and digitally coloured. Each of the 34 pieces is decorated with up to five individual elements, such as sea algae, wakame, kallymenia, samphire and sea fans, and not one is repeated. Dinner plates, dessert plates and bread plates come with between two and four decors each, so you can have fun setting the table as no two pieces are the same.

Even though the collection revolves around just three main colours (pink, green and sand), to achieve the same depth of tone found in the original pressed samples, the full palette includes about 30 different shades. Scott credits the collaborative nature of working with Perelman and Fabry for this perfect translation onto the porcelain. ‘We wanted to remain true to the original drawings, and the plates end up as close to the possible original drawing,’ say Perelman and Fabry.

No stranger to Hermès, Scott's collaboration began in 2018 with her first scarf design, and she has also created blankets, beach towels and some fashion accessories. Perelman and Fabry were attracted to Scott’s ‘very rigorous approach, where the figurative becomes very geometrical’ as well as the ‘right degree of formality and the right approach to composition’.

Natures Marines is a departure from the recent services like A Walk in the Garden by Nigel Peake and Hippomobile by Gianpaolo Pagni, which are decidedly more graphic. Although the pair are less ‘comfortable’ with the figurative, they felt safe in Scott’s hands thanks to ‘her rigorous composition, good eye for colour as well as how the elements are laid out in a kind of geometry’.

The service was used to serve dishes by Arles-based chef Céline Pham who prepared tarts, pickles and translucent rice rolls, all made of delicate layers of coloured root vegetables, bitter leaves and nasturtiums.