In case anyone is interested, I came up with lore around the house tea sets while I was drawing the common room series. The idea is that each house got a house tea set a long time ago and they all handled it differently.
First up, the responsible houses:
Ravenclaws are orderly and don't often break cups. In the occasion that one is broken, they'll try to repair it and if that fails, the 7th year prefects are tasked with finding a potter to commission a new replacement from. They try to get them close to the originals but as is the case with handmade art, each one is slightly different. That's part of the charm.
If you're going to make tea in the common room, be careful with it and don't spill. If you're careless, clumsy, or ruin something, the prefects might ban you from drinking anything but water in the common room.
They have designated areas of the common room where food is allowed and near the piano is not one of them so there is no snack in the picture. (I actually just hadn't thought to add snacks till Slytherin. Apologies to Ravenclaw)
Slytherins are neat and care about social graces. (unfortunately for me as an autistic Slytherin lol) They have tea carts and the cups are expected to be returned to the cart and any crumbs cleaned up. If you bring a tea cart out, you are responsible for it and that means you're basically hosting. You pour tea, you pass out pastries, you make sure the right number of cups end up back on the cart before it is put back.
When a Slytherin cup is broken, another is duplicated instead of putting up with the minor imperfections of repairing the broken one. Over time, this has resulted in a lot of the cups being almost too identical because they are mostly duplicates of each other. They look perfect and uniform but it's almost uncanny and it's difficult to remember which is your cup if you put it down.
Now onto the chaos houses:
Gryffindors can be a bit careless so cups get broken regularly. They try to repair and duplicate them to keep the original house design around but students also bring cups from home. They think it's funny to steal the cups from the other houses so they have at least one cup from each house, including the last remaining Hufflepuff cup. It doesn't look too special but it'll stay in its display case forever as a trophy. They also stole a teapot lid from Slytherin which caused quite the stir when it went missing.
Sometimes the prefects with get blank cups and paints/glazes and hold a cup painting day to get the first years socializing and build house unity. The hand painted cups have the painter's initials on them and are often left behind after graduation to add to the house collection. In one of the pictures, you can see two cups with MW and AW for Matilda and Arthur Weasley. (Professor Weasley and her brother from my story.)
Hufflepuffs areā¦ clumsy. Cups get broken all the time and within the first five years, they realized all their original cups were broken from being knocked over and used as plant pots and no one had thought to duplicate any. The prefects of the era went to their head of house, who directed them to the original craftsman who made them to order more. They discovered that the original maker was dead and out of respect for the story, Hufflepuffs since then have collected mismatched cups instead. The 7th year prefects are tasked every year with heading out to procure more cups to replace however many were broken the last year. They ask artists for any that got messed up during glazing, thrift shop, and find any other way to get pretty, mismatched cups for cheap. Some people bring cups from home as well.
You can also see in the pictures one of the cups from the neutral hangout space that someone accidentally stole being used as a planter. The rest are cups from my own teacup collection that I used pictures of with lineart over the top because I love my collection (plus one from @merlinmonroe1066 ) and most of them are thrifted so I thought they were perfect for this.
Also, they know Gryffindor have one of their original cups. They don't want it back. Having it makes the Gryffindors happy and it'd get broken in the Hufflepuff common room anyway.
Finally, this is the neutral hangout space tea set. They can be found around the castle and are managed by the Hogwarts Caretaker and house elves. They d really have the history or lore that the house sets do but they're still pretty.
