Anna Weatherley, an only child, has come a long way since she and her mother, a widow, escaped from the Communist regime in their homeland of Hungary and fled to Australia decades ago. These days, Weatherley works in a soothing, all white studio in Arlington, where she designs her namesake porcelain collection that is exquisitely hand-painted in Budapest.
Anna Weatherley Designs are carried in fine stores across the country including Neiman Marcus at Mazza Gallerie, where Tulip, a popular pattern, sells for $784 for a five-piece place setting. Her plates have even been featured on “Sex and the City.”
Many in Washington may remember Weatherley from the years when she ran a fashion studio in Foggy Bottom where she used to design flirtatious chiffon one-of-a-kind cocktail dresses that were worn by Pamela Harriman, Deeda Blair, Lady Bird Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.
But by the late ’80s, Weatherley was “burned out” with fashion, and more than a bit curious to learn what remained in Hungary after the Communist regime fell. So she closed up shop and headed to Budapest.
“During communist times, any art form was governed by government officials,” Weatherley says. But glasnost offered a golden opportunity and Weatherley sought out artisan painters, revived freehand painting and put them to work hand-painting porcelain with designs based on 16th, 17th and 18th century botanical art.
An Auspicious Start
Weatherley launched her second creative career when she walked into Asprey in New York City without an appointment and holding a brown paper bag. “I said, ‘I’d like to show you my porcelain.’ I looked ratty, it had been raining. I think the woman felt sorry for me, so she looked.” And, she bought Weatherley’s work on the spot.
Since then Weatherley’s been prolific, buying porcelain in France, Germany and the Czech Republic and designing exquisite patterns inspired by the botanical art of William Hooker, Pierre-Joseph Redoute, Maria Sibylla Merian and Giovanna Garzoni, among others.
A flaw in her first collection led to a signature for Weatherley. When workers called from Budapest and reported that little black spots were on the plates in her premiere line, she told them to paint tiny bugs over the flaws to cover them. Her workers painted a cockroach on one and other equally realistic insects on others. The plates did not sell.
But buyers were intrigued by the idea, so Weatherley reworked it designing lovely, graceful bugs in beautiful colors and shapes, adding golden and silver dots, stripes and other designs where Mother Nature never thought to put them. The bugs caught on and became a trademark just like Weatherley’s butterflies.
She had designed a blue butterfly on her first plate in honor of her father-in-law, Peter Contis, a well-known folk painter who had worked butterflies into his oil paintings. Now every Weatherley design has a delicate butterfly and colorful bug. One might find a ladybug on the handle of a teapot, a cricket in the center of a saucer beneath where a teacup would sit, a snail crawling around a cache-pot, a grasshopper on a biscuit jar or a fly buzzing around a soup tureen. But it’s taken years to reach this refined point.
When Weatherley first started working with her Hungarian crew, she faced big challenges. “I had to train every single worker,” she says. One of her biggest obstacles was fighting the mentality of people who had grown up under the Communist regime. “I had to teach them to stand on their own feet and be responsible. They felt that even if they didn’t work, they would still get paid. When I said, ‘You have to work to get paid,’ it was a foreign concept…I told them, ‘You can work for me, but you have to produce.’ ” She’s also encountered some cultural differences.
‘Those Crazy Hungarians’
“Hungarians are macho guys. Little bugs are too sissy for them,” she says, explaining that one plate passes through the hands of three people before it is complete. “The guys paint the large leaves, women do the little butterflies and bugs, and a little lady does the gold trim.”
Weatherley says she can sense the mood of her workers by the way they paint. “I always know who painted what. If they’re happy, they paint leaves one way. If they have a hangover, I can tell. If they’ve had a fight with their wife, they paint a certain way.”
Those Crazy Americans
Weatherley laughs when recalling how she tried to explain some American habits to the Hungarians. One of her 60 workers in Budapest, for instance, was amazed when she received requests from American chefs for larger chargers to display their nouvelle cuisine creations. “The Americans are so rich that they eat that much potatoes and meat?” the worker asked her. “The Americans, the richer they are, the less they eat. They eat less than you did during the war,” Weatherley responded.
“Sex and the City”
Weatherley’s warm brown eyes twinkle as she recalls the episode of “Sex and the City” when her plates made a guest appearance. Charlotte York (played by Kristin Davis) and her fiancé, Harry Goldenblatt (played by Evan Handler) were shopping in Bergdorf Goodman, when York picked up an Anna Weatherley plate and said, “I want this.” The porcelain cost $300 or $400 per plate and her fiancé asked, “Are you sure you want this?” “Yes,” York assured him. Then he said “Okay” and handed her an envelope. “It was a prenuptial agreement that he wanted her to sign right in the middle of Bergdorf’s!” says Weatherley, who held her breath when it looked like York was going to slam her plate on the floor. (She didn’t.)
A Warm Bath
How does Weatherley think of so many ideas for her porcelain designs? “Usually, I sit in a bathtub and come up with ideas. Then I run out of the bathtub stark naked and sketch my ideas or ring up Budapest and start telling the manager what colors to get out.”
Mix it Up
Weatherley wants clients to mix her designs like flowers in a wild English garden. She likes a table set with a mélange of dandelions, Dutch tulips, bluebells, water lilies, frogs, thistles, butterflies, poppies, mushrooms, hummingbirds and any other design a hostess might like to add. “Don’t be uptight, just be nonchalant,” she says. “Nothing actually matches. It’s just like when I did dresses. I hate to have ‘matchy-matchy.’ ”
