Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau
— the house the Indre paints back.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Renaissance château set on an island in the Indre, about twenty-five kilometres southwest of Tours. Begun in 1518 by Gilles Berthelot, a financier in Francis I's royal treasury; he fled France in 1528 with the work unfinished, the towers still scaffolded. Balzac called it a faceted diamond set in the Indre. The view people come for is the south wall returning whole in the water, slate roof and pepper-pot turrets doubled below the line. Best on a still morning, before the breeze breaks the second château.
Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau, 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.
Château d'Azay-le-Rideau sits on a small island in the Indre River, about twenty-five kilometres southwest of Tours in the Centre-Val de Loire region. It is one of the earliest works of the French Renaissance, built between 1518 and 1527 for Gilles Berthelot, a financier in the royal treasury under Francis I. Construction was largely overseen by his wife Philippa Lesbahy. In 1528, after his patron Jacques de Beaune was tried and hanged for embezzlement, Berthelot fled and the unfinished château was confiscated by the crown. The French State purchased the property in 1905. It is now a national monument under the Centre des monuments nationaux and is part of the UNESCO listing for the Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes.
The building is a pivot piece between French late-Gothic and Italian Renaissance, raised in the brief window when Francis I was bringing Italian masons north and a generation of French financiers was building stone evidence of the new style. The corner pepper-pot turrets and the broad mansard slates read as French; the straight-flight loggia stairwell, the regular pilasters, and the carved dormers read as Italian. Honoré de Balzac, who summered nearby at the Château de Saché in the 1830s while writing 'Le Lys dans la Vallée,' called Azay-le-Rideau a faceted diamond set in the Indre. The tufa limestone used through the Loire Valley cuts soft and weathers pale, which is part of why the building gathers light the way it does and gives the reflection its even tone.
The château is built into a side channel of the Indre, a tributary of the Loire, with the river drawn through a moat that surrounds three sides of the building. The result is the view the place is known for: the south façade, returning whole on the water with turrets, dormers, and slate doubled below the line, most evenly mirrored in the still hour after sunrise or before sunset, when the breeze drops and the surface lays flat. The Indre rises near Saint-Priest-la-Marche in the Cher department and runs about 280 kilometres before it joins the Loire west of Tours. The reflection is the photograph carried home; almost every guidebook of the Loire Valley puts it on the cover.