Bordeaux
— — the long stone quay the river softens at dusk.
Not only on a wall.
“Bordeaux sits inside a crescent bend of the Garonne, twenty miles upstream from the Gironde estuary. The eighteenth-century quays run for kilometres of pale limestone, fronting the Place de la Bourse and its mirror of water. The city is the gateway to one of the great wine regions of the world; the river still carries barges, and the trams hum quietly across the Pont de pierre.
Bordeaux, 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.
Bordeaux is the capital of the Gironde department and Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, on the Garonne River about fifty kilometres from the Atlantic coast. The metro holds around 1.2 million people. The city's eighteenth-century centre — laid out under intendants Tourny and Boucher, and ringed by 350 hectares of classical façades — was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007 as the Port of the Moon, the largest urban listing in France. The Garonne meets the Dordogne just downstream to form the Gironde, the largest estuary in western Europe.
The pale, almost cream-colour of Bordeaux is calcaire de Bourg — a soft limestone quarried along the Dordogne and used across the eighteenth-century rebuild. The Place de la Bourse, finished in 1755 by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV, sets the standard façade; the Grand Théâtre, opened in 1780 by Victor Louis, completes it. After a long century of soot the city scrubbed its façades in the 1990s, returning the stone to its original pale tone. The Miroir d'eau, the world's largest reflecting pool, was added across from the Bourse in 2006.
Most visitors walk the quays from Place des Quinconces south to the Pont de pierre — Napoleon's seventeen-arch bridge, opened in 1822 — and then through the old quartier Saint-Pierre. The Cité du Vin, opened in 2016 on the river north of the centre, is the city's signature contemporary building. Day trips run by car or train into the Médoc, Saint-Émilion, and Sauternes appellations. The Bordeaux–Saint-Jean station puts central Paris two hours away by TGV. Trams A, B, C, and D cover most of what a first-time visitor wants to reach.