Exploring Pewter — a Once Fusty, Now Weirdly Cool Material — Via 22 Vintage and New Pieces You Can Bring Into Your Home

When I was in Stockholm earlier this fall for Svenskt Tenn’s 100th anniversary exhibition, I thought about pewter — which is a primary part of the Swedish design store’s lore and product catalog — a lot. We talk about metal often on this site, but unlike brass, which can be a turn-off in the wrong context, there’s almost no silvery toned metal that I’d ever tire of. Aluminum, stainless steel, chrome — all eternally perfect. (Okay, let us not speak of brushed nickel.) But there’s something uniquely appealing about pewter, despite its somewhat fusty early connotations as part of a kind of American Revolution cosplay kit. I started to wonder whether we were on the verge of a renaissance with this ancient material. (Turns out I wasn’t the only one.)

Pewter is the kind of thing that frequently comes back into vogue. It gained popularity in the 1920s with the Swedish Grace movement, but at the time, it contained lead. (Something to think about when you’re hunting for vintage pieces — I wouldn’t drink out of a pitcher from that time period!) But in the 1970s, pewter became lead-free and once again a popular material with which to experiment. When working on a pewter project with the Italian company Numa in the 1990s, Ettore Sottsass remarked: “Contemporary pewter no longer contains the lead that gave the objects a dark, medieval, Germanic surface. This alloy instead contains antimony; this is how brilliant objects are made, similar to silver, which do not lose their immobility and presence.”

Personally, I love pewter in all its forms, and when I reached out to a RISD professor, he told me that it’s also a material that’s often popular with students because of its low melting point — you don’t need a professional foundry in which to cast it — ensuring experiments with the material are in no danger of abating. Here, we’ve pulled together 22 of our favorite vintage and new pieces, but mark my words to set those search alerts. Pewter’s popularity is on the rise.

Top: Svenskt Tenn’s Vase Profile by Anna Petrus, 1927, 2,860 EUR