Mount Royal
— — the city's quietest summit, in plain view.
Not only on a wall.
“The hill the city is named for. Montrealers walk it the way Bostonians walk the Common, in every weather, every hour, often with a dog. Frederick Law Olmsted laid the carriage road in 1876, the same hand that drew Central Park. The lookout faces south over the river and the downtown towers, and the lit cross on the eastern summit comes on at dusk. from the studio
Mount Royal, 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.
Mount Royal is the wooded hill at the centre of Montreal, on the Island of Montreal in Quebec. The summit rises 233 metres above the river, the highest of three small peaks that locals also count as part of the massif. The 200-hectare park around it was laid out in 1876 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the American landscape architect who had already drawn Central Park in New York. The Kondiaronk Belvedere, on the south face, looks down over the Saint Lawrence and the downtown core.
The park is open every day, free, from six in the morning until midnight. Two main entrances serve it: the Peel Street stairs from downtown, and the Camillien-Houde road from Outremont. The Chalet du Mont-Royal at the lookout dates to 1932 and houses Quebec history paintings inside its stone hall. The lit steel cross at the eastern summit, thirty metres tall, has marked the hill since 1924 and switches on at dusk every evening of the year.
Autumn is the hill's clearest season. The sugar maples and red oaks on the south face turn through the first two weeks of October, and the city below reads as a low grey grid beneath them. Winter brings cross-country tracks across Beaver Lake and tubing on the east slope. The Tam-Tams gathering, an open drum circle at the George-Etienne Cartier monument, has met on summer Sundays since the late 1970s and runs until the snow returns.