Outside of Seguin, on the winding roads of Guadalupe County, a rare treasure lies tucked away in what was once a dance hall.
Polmedia Polish Pottery imports and sells one-of-a-kind handcrafted ceramic stoneware from Poland.
Monika Papiez is the face of the company and manages the store and the social media side of the business. She’s also a collector and lover of the pottery she sells.
“We’ve been here for 20 years,” she said. “Before that, we were shipping orders from the Chicago area. We needed a bigger warehouse, and needed a bigger space, and Texas was one of the places where we liked the weather, so we settled here in Seguin, and we love it here. This is a family-run business. All of the family is involved. At this moment, we have about 25 employees, excluding the family, and it’s growing. Every year, we need more help because people learn about Polish pottery.”
Inside the shop, shelves are lined with everything from cookware to decorative items. Creamy white clay ties the pieces together, while splashes of cobalt blue create a visually familiar theme across all the pieces whether it is a mug or a yarn bowl. Beyond the storefront, in the back, a warehouse awaits shoppers with ceiling-high shelves filled with row upon row of pottery waiting to be explored.
The clay itself is part of what makes Polish pottery unique. Such pure white clay can be found in the Boleslawiec region of Poland.
“This is the natural clay color,” Papiez said. “When you think about ceramics, you think of that orange/brown clay. This is white. We call it pottery because it is beautiful and colorful, but this is stoneware. It is meant to be used and abused. It is hard to chip or scratch or even break them. I’ve had instances where I’ve dropped a mug on my kitchen floor, which is tile, and it just bounced off the floor, and I caught it again in my hand. Nothing happened to it. Even our customers repeat these stories. And another thing is, it’s fired twice in the kiln. Before they paint it, they fire the rock clay so it’s harder. They paint it, then cover it with glaze and then fire it again at very high temperatures so it solidifies like rock. So, the glaze is always shiny, and the colors never fade. I have pieces in my personal collection from the 1960’s and the colors are the same. It’s amazing. Not only that, but when you’re cooking on it, nothing sticks to it. It cleans like it’s magical.”
Everything in the shop is handmade and hand decorated. From simple sponged-on designs to intricate (and even custom) hand-painted artwork, each step of the production process is completed with careful attention to detail.
“It’s really time-consuming to create even one piece,” Papiez said. “At each level of the process of producing one, every single time a person is touching it –– even making the form for a mug it requires something like five people to create it because one person is going to pour the form, then other person is going to pull the form for the handle, and then there’s another person who’s going to sit and put them together. Then another person cleans it, and then at the end, you have the painters, the artists, who decorate each single piece of pottery. So, an incredible amount of work goes into each piece.”
When a piece comes together, it becomes a usable piece of art that can either be part of a matching set or a standalone piece in an eclectic mishmash of patterns. Settings can be made from matching pieces, all painted in a similar color scheme and pattern, or they can work individually, as each piece still has the same striking white clay base, regardless of the artwork painted on it.
When Papiez first started her collection, the peacock print was her favorite, but nowadays, the more patterns — the better, with holidays becoming a competition to see who will get the prettiest place setting to enjoy for the day.
“One of the traditional patterns is the peacock eyes, which is based on peacock feathers,” she said. “All the old traditional patterns refer to the peacock, which means prosperity, and that’s why it was my pattern when I first started out. Now, I love more patterns, more flowers, more everything. That’s better for me right now.”
And with countless items within Polmedia Polish Pottery’s stock to choose from, both Papiez and shopgoers can spend hours wandering the aisles to find the perfect piece to add to, or even start, their collection.
