Chateau de Chenonceau
— the gallery the river runs beneath.
Not only on a wall.
“The château sits across the river, not beside it. Five arches step over the Cher and carry a long gallery from one bank to the other. The house was mostly built by women: Katherine Briçonnet, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, Louise Dupin. In a later war the same gallery served as a quiet crossing between occupied and free France. The gardens hold the shape they were given in the 1550s. On still mornings the river under the floor shows the windows back to themselves.
Chateau de Chenonceau, 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 de Chenonceau spans the River Cher in the village of Chenonceaux, about 35 km east of Tours in the Indre-et-Loire département of Centre-Val de Loire. It is the second-most-visited château in France after Versailles, drawing roughly 850,000 visitors a year. The estate is part of the wider Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage cultural landscape in 2000 for its concentration of Renaissance châteaux. Chenonceau has been in private hands since 1913, when the chocolate-making Menier family bought it. Trains from Paris reach Chenonceaux station on the Tours line in about two hours, and the platform sits a short walk from the front gate.
Five segmental arches carry the château across the Cher. Katherine Briçonnet oversaw the original square keep and main house between 1514 and 1522, on the piers of an old water mill. Diane de Poitiers, given the property by Henri II, commissioned the bridge from Philibert Delorme between 1556 and 1559. When Catherine de Medici took the estate back after the king's death, she set Jean Bullant the task of raising a 60-metre Grande Galerie on top of the bridge, finished around 1576. Louise Dupin, the Enlightenment salonnière who lived there during the Revolution, persuaded the local committee that the bridge was the only crossing for miles. The argument held. The building survived.
The château opens every day of the year, with hours that shift by season. The grounds include two formal gardens, one laid out by Diane de Poitiers along the river's north bank and the other by Catherine de Medici on the west, both kept to their sixteenth-century parterres. The maze, the working sixteenth-century kitchen, the donkey paddock, and the floral workshop are included with admission. Audio guides are offered in about a dozen languages. Visitors typically allow two to three hours for the interior and gardens combined. Photography without flash is permitted throughout, and most of the property is reachable by paved paths.