Avenue Foch
— the wide quiet under the chestnuts.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the widest avenues in Paris, opened under Napoleon III in the 1850s and named first for the Empress Eugénie, then in 1929 for the Marshal who held the Allied line in 1918. The chestnut canopies and grassy side allées run for a kilometre and a quarter, from the Arc de Triomphe out to the gates of the Bois de Boulogne. Mansions sit back behind their gates. Embassies share the postcode with families who have lived here for four generations. It's a long walk, and the grass strips along the centre carry as much foot traffic as the pavements.
Avenue Foch, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Avenue Foch runs for about 1.3 kilometres through the 16th arrondissement of western Paris, from the Place Charles de Gaulle at the Arc de Triomphe to the Porte Dauphine, where it opens onto the Bois de Boulogne. At roughly 120 metres across, it is one of the widest avenues in the city, with paved roadways flanking deep grass allées and double rows of chestnut trees. The avenue was laid out in the 1850s by the engineer Adolphe Alphand under Baron Haussmann, on the orders of Napoleon III, and originally named Avenue de l'Impératrice for the Empress Eugénie. It has been renamed twice since: Avenue du Bois de Boulogne in 1875 after the fall of the Second Empire, then Avenue Foch in 1929, the year Marshal Ferdinand Foch died.
The buildings along Avenue Foch are largely late nineteenth and early twentieth century, hôtels particuliers in the Beaux-Arts and Second Empire idioms, built within the boulevard system Baron Haussmann drew across Paris in the 1860s. Façades of pale Lutetian limestone, mansard slate roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and deep set-backs behind ornamental gates. Many of the buildings now serve as foreign embassies and consulates; others remain private residences passed through generations. The address has been considered among the most expensive in Europe for more than a century, and resale prices on the avenue routinely set the upper bound of the Paris residential market.
For an avenue that begins at the busiest roundabout in Paris, Avenue Foch is unusually quiet. The width, roughly 120 metres curb to curb, does much of the work. Vehicle traffic is held to two narrow roadways at the centre, while the outer thirds of the avenue are given over to lawn, gravel paths, benches, and the double rows of chestnuts. Residents walk dogs on the grass in the morning. The Bois de Boulogne, the 845-hectare park at the avenue's western end, draws joggers and pram-pushers past the apartment gates and out into the trees. On a still afternoon, the loudest sound on the median is gravel underfoot.