How My Dishware Obsession Got Out of Control

Resale sites are flush with vintage dinner sets right now—and I can't stop buying them.

- Chantal Braganza

A couple of years ago, I stepped into a cute little vintage shop in Bromont, Que., run out of a historic cottage on the only main street in town.

I was killing time before dinner and didn’t plan on buying anything, but on my way out, something caught my eye among the dusky silk robes and novelty teaspoons: a small mountain of ceramic dishware covered in primary-coloured balloons. Pops of blue, red and yellow danced across a set of breakfast plates, coffee mugs and latte cups big enough to be used as soup bowls. There was a cookie tray and a popcorn bowl too, pieces so charming in their particular intended use that was only amplified by the cheerful pattern. I fell in love immediately.

There must have been upwards of 40 pieces in the whole set, and the shop owner was selling it for a steal. I was travelling with just a carry-on suitcase, but I bought the set anyway. Despite the great deal—the cost of shipping them home to Toronto amounted to almost their sale price—it felt like an extravagant impulse purchase, something I’d only ever do once.

On the way back home, I googled the pattern: Party Balloons by Waechtersbach, a discontinued style from 1980s West Germany and still available in single-piece listings on resale sites like eBay. Before the dishes even arrived at my door, I’d hunted down a matching teapot and juice jug to go with the set. Within a week, my party balloon dish collection was happily doing breakfast rotation in my kitchen. But something about that first chance encounter with the dishes had me hooked. I wanted to be delighted like that again.

Specialty dish resale can get quite pricey, so I started combing Facebook Marketplace and online estate sales instead. I thought it would be hard to recreate that spark of culinary kismet, but I was quickly proven wrong. Every search term, from tea set to punch bowl to (if I was feeling particularly frisky)