Church of Saint Eustache
— — a hundred-year church beside the city's old belly.
Not only on a wall.
“A hundred years to build, from 1532 to 1632 — Gothic ribs threaded with Renaissance ornament because the styles changed under the masons' hands. It stood beside the Les Halles food market for four centuries; the market is gone now, the church is still there. The great organ has nearly eight thousand pipes. Berlioz premiered his Te Deum here in 1855, in front of nine hundred singers and musicians.
Church of Saint Eustache, 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.
The Church of Saint-Eustache stands on the north edge of the old Les Halles market, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. Construction ran from 1532 to 1632 — a hundred-year build that began in late Flamboyant Gothic and finished with Renaissance and classical ornament layered into the elevations as the styles changed. At 105 metres long and 44 metres to the vault, it is the second-largest church in Paris after Notre-Dame. The parish has stood on this site since the 13th century; the present building absorbed and replaced the earlier one.
The plan is a Notre-Dame echo — five aisles, an ambulatory, a chevet of radiating chapels — built in pale Paris limestone over the foundations of the 13th-century parish. The west façade was never finished in its original Gothic form; the present façade, classical and unmatched to the body behind it, was added between 1754 and 1788 by Jean Mansart de Jouy. The 1840s restoration by Victor Baltard rebuilt the spire's lost statuary. The result is a building that reads, fairly, as four centuries laid on top of each other.
The parish list reads as an index of Paris history. Molière, Cardinal Richelieu, and Madame de Pompadour were baptised here; the playwright's funeral was held in 1673; Colbert is buried in the north transept under a tomb by Le Brun and Coysevox. Mirabeau and La Fontaine were also buried from the church. The great organ, rebuilt by the Dutch firm Van den Heuvel in 1989 with around 8,000 pipes, is among the largest in France. Berlioz premiered his Te Deum here on 30 April 1855 with 900 performers.