Portmeirion Totem: The Coffee Set That Defined a Decade
There are pieces of post-war British design that feel inevitable in hindsight. Objects so perfectly calibrated to their moment that it's hard to imagine the world without them. The Portmeirion Totem coffee set is one of them.
Designed by Susan Williams-Ellis in 1963 and produced by Portmeirion Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, Totem arrived at precisely the right moment. British domestic design was shaking off the floral conservatism of the 1950s. The Festival of Britain had planted a seed. Modernism was filtering down from architecture into everyday objects. And Williams-Ellis, daughter of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis who built the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales, was paying close attention.
Portmeirion Totem: The Coffee Set That Defined a Decade
What Susan made
Totem is not a subtle piece of design. The pattern is a stack of abstract relief motifs, geometric and almost totemic in the anthropological sense, pressed directly into the clay body rather than painted onto the surface. There is no colour in the traditional sense. The decoration is structural. Light catches the raised forms differently depending on the angle, giving each mug a quiet, shifting presence on the table.
That restraint is what makes it work. In a decade of bold graphic design and Pop Art noise, Totem is considered. It sits closer to Barbara Hepworth than to Biba. It was made for people who bought their furniture from Heal's and their records from jazz import shops.
Williams-Ellis produced multiple Totem motifs, and each mug in a full set carries a different relief pattern, which means no two place settings are identical. It is, quietly, one of the more intelligent ideas in post-war British tableware.
Identifying Totem
Genuine early Totem pieces carry an oval Portmeirion backstamp with the pattern name. Later reissues exist, as Portmeirion have revisited the design periodically, but the originals from the 1960s have a particular weight and density to the stoneware body that later versions lack. The relief on early pieces is crisper, deeper, more confident.
Colourways on original sets are typically white or off-white with a satin glaze finish. The interiors of mugs are fully glazed. Lids on coffee pots and sugar bowls should fit with very little play, as sloppy lid fit is usually a sign of a later or lesser piece.
A complete original set, comprising six mugs, six saucers, coffee pot, cream jug and sugar bowl, is increasingly hard to find intact. Individual pieces turn up regularly at markets and car boots, often unrecognised for what they are. The backstamp is your friend.
What the market says
Single Totem mugs in good condition typically sell for £8-15 at market. A matched pair with saucers, £25-40. Complete or near-complete sets with the coffee pot are a different proposition entirely, and depending on condition and completeness, expect to pay £80-180 from a dealer who knows what they have. The market for early Portmeirion has been quietly strengthening as the generation that grew up with it starts buying it back.
The set we found
The example we have in stock is as complete as they come. Six mugs each carrying a different Totem motif, six saucers, cream jug and open sugar bowl, all in excellent condition with the oval Portmeirion Totem backstamp. Found as a set, kept as a set. These don't turn up like this very often.
View the Portmeirion Totem Coffee Set
A closing thought
Susan Williams-Ellis went on to design Botanic Garden, the pattern that made Portmeirion a household name. But Totem came first, and in many ways it is the more interesting object. The work of a designer thinking hard about what modern British life should look like at the table, before the commercial imperative arrived. It is rarer, quieter, and considerably harder to find. Which is precisely why we pick it when we see it.