The Loupian estate's pottery workshop was located on the banks of the Etang de Thau, at the mouth of the stream that drains the watershed farmed by the villa. The site's shoreline location was justified by the use of the lagoon for trade.
The buildings, which give an idea of the size of the investment, extend in a line along the shore for than 90 metres. An impressive building with buttresses and masonry walls held a large kiln. A vast warehouse, 65m long and 7m wide, was cut up into fifteen small rooms. Other, more small-scale developments allow us to reconstruct the initial stages of the ceramic-making process, from the extraction of the clay and its preparation in basins – wide ditches used for mixing, whose sides were lined with flat tiles. Very little remains of the shaping stage. The location of the potter wheels is known; like the workshop at Sallèles d'Aude near Narbonne, they were located in a single building. Circular pits held the wheel shafts, and a flywheel was used to regulate their speed. At the other end of the production chain, excavation of the shore revealed rubbish areas of scraps and wasters, mixed with ashes and charred wood taken from the kilns.
