Behind the scenes at France's Sèvres ceramics workshop

Nestled in the picturesque Sainte-Claude Park, the Sèvres factory is a temple to craftsmanship. Some of Europe's most beautiful ceramics have been made here since 1740. Thierry Brunet is one of the last three porcelain paste mixers in France. In his workshop, he uses these age-old machines. The aim is to make the mixture homogenous. You knead it until you get 250 kilos of homogenous paste. Here is the hard mix, the historical formula which was developed in 1770 after the discovery of kaolin in France. You won't find this machine anywhere else, because this step no longer exists in industrial ceramic making. Come with me, I'll show you what it takes to make porcelain. So here we have three key ingredients. Kaolin is clay for the shape and the whiteness. Then quartz for the translucency and the vitrification of the porcelain. And the last ingredient is feldspar, which lowers the firing temperature of the mixture. In the factory's workshops, 120 potters use skills and techniques that have been handed down from generation to generation over three centuries. The craftsmen here say it takes three years to learn the bare essentials, and seven to be totally at ease. I visited Sèvres, and when I saw the potters and the craft, let's just say I fell in love with the place. I love handling the clay. It's a physical job, but I'm in my element when I work with it. Beneath the factory's windows sit the plate calibrators and the turners who lean over their wheels. They skillfully handle this cutting tool called the tournesin. A few steps further on are the ever-patient cutters. It takes them months of work to finish a patterned Chinese service, cell by cell. This is a finished piece. In each workshop, every move has to be precise to the nearest millimetre, with the artists using some of the most precious materials. So, I mix the gold powder with the matte gold and the dilutant so that I have a homogenous mix to paint with. This here is gold. In the kiln, all that's brown and black evaporates and we're left with just the grains of gold which stick to the enamel. No movement and no unnecessary chatter. With each piece being so valuable, maximum concentration is needed. This is a re-edition of a quai d'Orsay dinner service made for a private collector. These are exceptional sets. We don't often get the opportunity to paint things like this. This plate is particularly difficult. I'll spend two to three months working on it. Glazed, hand-painted and gilded with the finest gold. Painted with brushes made of badger hair, the famous Sèvres blue in its many shades remains the iconic colour of the factory. But times have changed and so has the factory. It now employs chemical research engineers. They test the pastes, inks and colours. Over a thousand pigments, powders, precious metals and glazes are used. Chemical formulas, which are all carefully noted down in these old logbooks. Here I'm looking in a logbook from 1898. And this one is from 1925. Nothing is thrown away here. Neither the chemical formulas, nor the sketches and drawings made since the factory was first set up. There are 100,000 original plaster moulds stored in a special part of the building, nicknamed the loot. Fabien Perronet is the guardian of this treasure chest, which houses gems such as this 15-piece mould made by the famous sculptor Falcone. We can't make the whole thing out of just one mould. So here is the mould for the leg. These are the small pieces. This is the thumb. This is a piece of the hand. The moulded pieces are so delicate that from 1752 they were just left bare, without any enamel. And so the Sèvres porcelain was born, and its whiteness even rivals marble. I'm just doing some retouching here. You can't get all the detail you want from the moulds. The hardest part for me is the hair. It's complicated to make something nice that doesn't look like noodles. This is the chair, the lower part of the character. I'll put all the different pieces together once they've all been retouched. They're easy to work on when they're in your hand. Once they're all assembled, you can't work on them in the same way. And so the skills and know-how are kept alive in this public institution, set up on the of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, 277 years ago.