Cassis Port
— the hour the cliff turns the colour of brick.
Not only on a wall.
“A small fishing port east of Marseille, at the foot of Cap Canaille, one of the tallest sea cliffs in France. The harbour bends into a half-moon of pastel houses, with white-wine vineyards on the slopes behind. Fishing boats still come in at dawn. Beyond the breakwater the limestone calanques begin, deep blue-green inlets that draw the boat tours out from the quay all morning. By afternoon the cliff above turns the colour of dried brick. Before the day-trippers come down from Marseille, the only sound is rigging against mast.
Cassis Port, 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.
Cassis is a Mediterranean commune in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of Provence, about 20 kilometres east of Marseille along the coast. The town wraps around a small fishing harbour at the eastern edge of the Parc National des Calanques, the protected limestone coastline established in 2012. Behind the port rises Cap Canaille, a ridge of red-brown stone often listed among the tallest sea cliffs in France at roughly 394 metres. The commune holds a population near 7,200. The hills above the harbour carry the small AOC Cassis vineyards, planted on terraces that have produced white wine here since at least the 17th century.
Cap Canaille and the surrounding cliffs are an exposure of Cretaceous-age conglomerate and limestone, with iron oxides giving the rock the deep ochre and brick-red colour that distinguishes it from the white limestone of the Calanques on Cassis's western side. The cliff rises in a single near-vertical wall directly out of the Mediterranean to about 394 metres at its highest point, ranking it among the tallest sea cliffs in France. The Route des Crêtes climbs from Cassis up over the ridge to La Ciotat, with viewpoints that frame the port and the white inlets of En-Vau and Port-Miou below. Photographers favour late afternoon, when the western light turns the stone briefly luminous.
The harbour is the launch point for the small boats that work the Calanques. Operators run circuits of three, five, eight, or nine inlets, leaving from the quay roughly hourly from spring through autumn. Cassis is reached from Marseille by the TER regional train in about twenty-five minutes, then a shuttle or twenty-minute walk down into the town; by road, the A50 motorway takes about thirty minutes off-peak. The peak summer months bring heavy day-trip traffic; spring and early autumn are gentler. Walkers can reach the Calanque de Port-Miou on foot from the western edge of town in about twenty minutes.