Kitchener
— — a city that changed its name and kept its accent.
Not only on a wall.
“A Mennonite market town that grew into a tech city without losing its German bones. Sausage in the old farmers' market on Saturday morning, a working downtown on King Street, the Grand River sliding past the edge of it. The name was Berlin until 1916; the Oktoberfest stayed. — from the studio
Kitchener, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kitchener sits in the Region of Waterloo in southwestern Ontario, about 100 km west of Toronto, on the Grand River. It was founded by Pennsylvania German Mennonite settlers in the early 19th century and named Berlin until 1916, when wartime sentiment moved the city to rename itself for Lord Kitchener. Today it forms a tri-city with Waterloo and Cambridge, with a combined population over 575,000, and anchors a tech corridor seeded by the University of Waterloo to the north.
Two cycles run through the year here. The first is the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest, the largest Bavarian festival in North America since 1969, drawing roughly 700,000 visitors across nine October days. The second, quieter and older, is the Saturday morning Kitchener Market on Duke Street, where Old Order Mennonite farmers have brought sausage, summer-sausage, apple butter, and shoofly pie in from St. Jacobs and Elmira for generations. The festival is loud; the market is the city's actual pulse.
The downtown rebuilt itself around tech in the 2010s. Google's Canadian engineering headquarters occupies the old Breithaupt Block leather tannery on King Street, and the Communitech hub fills the former Lang Tanning building in the Tannery District. The ION light rail line opened in 2019 and runs the spine of the city north to Waterloo. The Mennonite buggies still come in on Saturday mornings; the engineers walk past them on the way to coffee.