Villeroy & Boch Alte Abtei Mettlach

The Alte Abtei in Mettlach began as a Benedictine monastery building, part of an abbey founded in the 10th century on the site of an earlier religious community, before being secularized in the early 19th century following the French Revolutionary period's dissolution of German monasteries. In 1809, the Boch family acquired the vacant abbey buildings and converted them into a ceramics factory, and the site became the headquarters of Villeroy & Boch after the 1836 merger of the Boch and Villeroy porcelain and earthenware businesses, a role the building has held for more than two centuries. The abbey's original vaulted rooms and stone walls remain visible throughout the complex, now adapted to house company offices alongside public exhibition spaces documenting the history of ceramics and tableware production. Named pieces on display include historic Villeroy & Boch tableware, tiles, and sanitary ceramics spanning the company's output from the early 19th century to the present, alongside displays explaining the manufacturing techniques used across different periods. The riverside grounds include the Merziger Torturm, a surviving fragment of the medieval abbey's fortified gate tower, and a garden laid out along the Saar embankment. The site's continuous industrial use since 1809 makes it a notable example of a former monastery repurposed for manufacturing rather than left as a ruin or converted into a museum from the outset, with the exhibition function added only in later decades alongside its ongoing role as a working company headquarters.