Clermont-Ferrand
— the black-stone city the volcanoes left.
Not only on a wall.
“A city built from its own volcanoes. The cathedral and most of the old town are cut from Volvic lava-stone, so the walls read dark grey against the green of the Chaîne des Puys behind them. The Puy de Dôme rises a few miles west, dormant for thousands of years. The light here is northern; the stone keeps it cool.
Clermont-Ferrand, 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.
Clermont-Ferrand is the capital of the Puy-de-Dôme department in central France, sitting on a plateau in the Auvergne at roughly 400 metres of elevation. The city of about 145,000 looks west to the Chaîne des Puys, a 40-kilometre line of around 80 dormant volcanoes inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2018. The Puy de Dôme itself rises to 1,465 metres and has a cogwheel railway, the Panoramique des Dômes, that climbs from the lower town. Blaise Pascal was born here in 1623.
The dark colour of the old town comes from Volvic andesite, a volcanic stone quarried since the medieval period from a flow off the Puy de la Nugère, about ten kilometres north. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, begun in 1248 under the architect Jean Deschamps, is the most ambitious Gothic building ever cut from lava. Its twin spires, completed in the 1880s by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's office, reach 96 metres. The smaller Romanesque basilica of Notre-Dame-du-Port, a few streets away, predates it by a century and is built from a paler arkose.
The city sits on the Paris–Béziers rail line, about three and a half hours south of Paris by direct train. The cathedral and Notre-Dame-du-Port stand a short walk apart in the old quarter, both free to enter outside services. To climb the Puy de Dôme, the Panoramique des Dômes cogwheel railway runs daily on a reduced schedule in winter, from the lower station at La Font-de-l'Arbre. From the summit, on a clear day, the whole Chaîne des Puys lies south to north.