Zealand
— — the island the country grew from.
Not only on a wall.
“Zealand is the largest of the Danish islands, holding Copenhagen on its eastern coast and the medieval cathedrals of Roskilde inland. Beech forests fall toward white-sand beaches; lakes pool in the middle of the country. The Øresund opens east toward Sweden, the Great Belt west toward Funen. The light is northern and slow, and the island has been the centre of Danish life for more than a thousand years.
Zealand, 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.
Zealand — Sjælland in Danish — is the largest of Denmark's roughly 400 islands, covering 7,031 square kilometres and home to about 2.6 million people, just under half of the country's population. Copenhagen sits on the island's east coast facing the Øresund, the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden; Roskilde, the medieval capital and seat of the Viking-era kings, lies thirty kilometres west on a fjord of the same name. Since 2000 the Øresund Bridge has linked the island directly to Malmö, and the Great Belt Fixed Link has joined it to Funen since 1998.
At 55 degrees north Zealand sits in the latitude band where the summer days run nearly nineteen hours and the winter days barely seven. The result is a particular horizontal light — low across the meadows in late afternoon, gold against the brick of the cathedrals — that Danish painters of the late nineteenth century built their school around. The Skagen painters worked further north in Jutland, but the same coastal light reaches Zealand's beaches at Tisvilde and Hornbæk, where the dunes catch the last hour of summer well into ten at night.
Copenhagen is the gateway: Kastrup Airport sits on the island of Amager, joined to the city by metro and rail in under fifteen minutes. From the central station, regional trains reach Roskilde in twenty minutes, Helsingør and Kronborg Castle — Shakespeare's Elsinore — in forty-five, and Næstved in the south in just over an hour. Bicycles travel for free on most regional trains, and the country's national cycle routes thread the island from the Stevns Klint cliffs in the southeast to the beech forests of Gribskov in the north.