Our story
Seven generations, one town, and a workshop that has never moved.
Ernest Mauviel opened his workshop in Villedieu-les-Poêles in 1830. The town had already been working copper for six hundred years by then, close enough to the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel to hear the tide, and it is where every Mauviel pan has been made since. The company is still owned by the family. Valérie Le Guern Gilbert, the seventh generation, took it over in 2006.
About seventy craftsmen work there. Between them they cut, spin, hammer, rivet, tin and polish roughly 1,300 different pieces — not 1,300 pans a day, but 1,300 distinct items in the catalogue, from a 9 cm saucepan to a 50 cm turbot kettle that two people carry.
Why copper, and why not only copper
Copper conducts heat about twenty times better than stainless steel and roughly twice as well as aluminium. That is the whole argument: the pan answers the flame instead of lagging behind it. It is why the house started in copper and why the copper collections are still the ones professionals ask for.
It is also why Mauviel did not stop there. A copper pan will not work on induction, because copper is not magnetic. Rather than concede the induction kitchen, the workshop learned to draw multiple metals into a single body — five-ply and six-ply stainless, aluminium cores, carbon steel, and M’6 S, which is copper on the outside with a layer of steel the induction coil can read. Few manufacturers work one of those materials properly. Working all of them in one building is the unusual part.
Made to be repaired
Handles are cast in bronze or stainless, filed, and riveted rather than welded. A rivet can be drilled out, so a handle can be replaced instead of the pan. Tinned copper can be stripped and re-tinned when the lining finally wears through. This is not sentiment about craft — it is the reason a Mauviel pan bought in 1985 is still in service, and the reason the guarantee against manufacturing defect runs for life.
Mauviel in South Africa
mauviel.co.za is operated by Culinary Equipment Company (Pty) Ltd from Lanseria, Gauteng, the appointed distributor for South Africa. Every piece is bought from the factory in Normandy and shipped here — there is no grey import in the range and no second-quality stock. What is in Lanseria dispatches in two working days; what is not is ordered from the workshop, and the product page tells you which before you buy.
Company history and manufacturing detail follow Mauviel1830, Villedieu-les-Poêles, Normandy.