Porcelain

Lladró and Nao figurines, fine-china services and bisque dolls:

figurines draw the most collectors, and Lladró, the Valencia workshop with the blue bellflower on its base, is the name that comes up most. Nao is the same family’s simpler, cheaper line, and Royal Doulton ladies turn up beside both. Tableware divides by body: hard-paste porcelain from Bavaria or Limoges, bone china from English makers such as Wedgwood or Royal Albert, and Japanese fine china, Noritake above all. An antique bisque head is a collector’s piece, while the boxed porcelain dolls sold by mail order late in the last century were made in huge runs and mostly fetch little. Crystal figures from the same shelf belong under Swarovski, and the display cabinet that holds them under antiques.

Porcelain, bone china and the pieces that only look like them:

hold a cup or a plate up to a window. Porcelain and bone china let light through where they are thin, bone china with a warmer white, and both ring clearly when flicked with a fingernail. Then turn it over. The unglazed rim on the base should be white and glassy; a buff or grey body that soaks up a drop of water is earthenware, and so is anything stamped semi-porcelain or ironstone, however fine the decoration. Chorotega pottery from Guaitil is burnished clay made by hand in Guanacaste, prized on its own terms rather than as porcelain. Cold porcelain is an air-dry modelling paste, and the paste, moulds and paints for it go under art and craft supplies.

Where the money sits, from plain white sets to Lladró:

most of the new porcelain tableware arriving in Costa Rica is made in China, and a new everyday set of 16 pieces starts at about ₡20,000, which caps what an unmarked used set can ask whatever its condition. A standard glazed Lladró in good order mostly changes hands between ₡25,000 and ₡150,000, a fraction of what the brand charges for a new piece, because collectors are fewer than when these figures were given as presents and the cabinets now being emptied hold plenty of them. Nao goes for less, while large retired groups and numbered limited editions sit well above that band.

The bellflower mark, glued fingers and faded gold rims:

on a Lladró the backstamp should be a crisp cobalt blue, with the bellflower logo centred above the name and the model number often incised beside it. A logo scraped away means the piece left as a factory second or through a discount outlet, and collectors pay far less for it; a purplish stamp or a smudged ® over the o points to a counterfeit. Fingers, petals and lace break first, so check them, then run a UV torch over the piece in a dark room: glued and repainted repairs glow differently from the glaze around them. With tableware, tap each rim gently, since a hairline crack turns the ring into a dull click. Gold bands worn thin and patchy mean the set has lived in a dishwasher, and a missing platter or cups from another pattern hurt a service more than one chipped saucer.

Listing a dinner service or a shelf of figurines:

photograph the base of every figurine with the mark in sharp focus, then the front, the back and both hands, and give the model number if it can be read. For a service, count by type, from dinner plates down to cups and saucers, and name the pattern on the backstamp, because people filling gaps in their own set search by pattern name. Say whether the box and certificate survive and exactly where each chip is. Someone coming from Grecia or Pérez Zeledón for a whole service will want that count before setting off, and should arrive with boxes and newspaper: porcelain wrapped piece by piece at the door is the porcelain that gets home whole.