Filters
Heidi Caillard was born in 1932 in Basel, Switzerland. From 1949 to 1954 she studied fine arts at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1962 she continued at the Lausanne School of Ceramics.
In 1968, she settled in Blauzac, a small village near Uzès, where she opened a ceramics workshop and showroom in the middle of the village. One of her customers, Daniel Caillard – a soldier stationed at the Garon air base near Nîmes – later became her husband.
In 1971, their first child, Adrien, was born. That same year, the couple bought a completely dilapidated farmhouse in Lussan – a house that had once belonged to the ancestors of the writer André Gide. They spent ten years renovating it, and already in 1974, in the middle of the work, they moved both the workshop and the shop there.
In 1994, Adrien Caillard took over the business – initially to relieve Heidi, but driven by his passion for the craft, he gradually became fully involved. He quickly learned everything there was to learn and acquired the necessary expertise. He optimized the packaging and structured the entire production process, without ever compromising the manual techniques that underlie each individual piece. The improvements opened the door to professional customers, and with participation in the international home furnishings fair in Paris – Maison et Objet – and numerous press reviews, the small workshop gradually achieved international recognition.
In 2000, an additional workshop was built in the same architectural style as the original mas. An impressive wooden structure designed by Daniel Sechet (atbc.fr) added 200 square meters of free, column-free workspace.
Today, a dedicated team maintains the quality and spirit that Heidi founded. Heidi herself, despite her age, still occasionally draws new pieces.
In 2011, Adrien launched a new chapter: Adrien's Caravan – a distillation of the expertise and love for the craft he has built up over decades.
His most famous creation is undoubtedly the guinea fowl – to many today it is simply the “Lussan guinea fowl”. The bird took shape in Heidi’s imagination already during her school days, and the living bird was already in the garden. The idea of a stylized, expressive sculpture was naturally on her mind from the beginning – but the path to the final form required long days of sketching, building and breaking down, over and over again, until the proportions were exactly right.
