Copenhagen
— — a harbour the city never quite leaves.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital built around its water. Nyhavn's painted townhouses face the canal where Hans Christian Andersen kept rooms; bicycles outnumber cars on most mornings; the bakeries open before the light does. Winter holds the sky low and grey for months, then summer gives back the long northern evenings. The Little Mermaid sits on her stone, smaller than first-time visitors expect.
Copenhagen, 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.
Copenhagen sits on the eastern coast of Zealand and the northern tip of Amager, across the Øresund strait from Malmö in Sweden. The two cities have been linked since 2000 by the 16-kilometre Øresund Bridge. Founded as a fishing village in the tenth century, Copenhagen became Denmark's capital in 1443 under King Christopher of Bavaria. The city's elevation is essentially at sea level, and its old core is organized around a chain of harbours and canals that still carry working traffic alongside tour boats.
Nyhavn was dug as a commercial harbour between 1670 and 1675 under Christian V, cutting a canal from Kongens Nytorv to the larger harbour basin. The townhouses along the sunny northern side, painted in saturated reds, ochres, and blues, mostly date from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Hans Christian Andersen lived at numbers 20, 67, and 18 across his life. Today the inner harbour is swimmable in summer, a turnaround documented in the city's harbour-clean-up reporting, and the water reads as a working part of daily life rather than a backdrop.
The Little Mermaid, sculpted by Edvard Eriksen and unveiled on 23 August 1913, sits on a stone at the Langelinie promenade about two kilometres north of Nyhavn. She is famously smaller than first-time visitors expect, at 1.25 metres tall. Tivoli Gardens, the second-oldest operating amusement park in the world, opened in 1843 and runs seasonal hours from spring through Halloween and a winter season around Christmas. The royal residence at Amalienborg keeps a daily changing of the guard at noon when the monarch is in residence.