Grand Menhir Brise

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.

It lies in a field in Locmariaquer, a coastal commune on a small peninsula at the southern entrance to the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, France, about 13 kilometres south of Carnac and roughly 30 kilometres southwest of Vannes.

Reconstructions put its original height at roughly 20.6 metres, about 67 feet, making it the tallest standing stone known from Neolithic Europe. It weighed an estimated 280 tonnes and would have stood upright for an unknown period before falling.

The stone now lies in four pieces. The leading hypotheses are deliberate destruction in antiquity, failure during erection, and a 4000-BCE earthquake. None has been confirmed; the question is still actively debated by Breton archaeologists.

Archaeological dating places the menhir's erection around 4500 BCE, during the Middle Neolithic. It would have been raised within the same broad period as the nearby Carnac alignments and the Table des Marchands passage grave at Locmariaquer.

Orthogneiss, a banded granite-like metamorphic rock. The block did not occur naturally at Locmariaquer; it was quarried at least four kilometres away and dragged to the site, almost certainly on log rollers and hide ropes.

Yes. The Locmariaquer site is open most of the year under the Centre des monuments nationaux. The path past the broken menhir, the Er-Grah tumulus, and the Table des Marchands takes about forty minutes; adult admission is single-digit euros.

Carnac and Locmariaquer are contemporary Neolithic complexes. Carnac is rows of thousands of smaller stones across several kilometres; Locmariaquer concentrates the weight in one block, the Grand Menhir Brisé, now broken in four pieces beside the Table des Marchands.

It has been a meaningful gift for our customers with roots in the region. Locmariaquer sits at the mouth of the Gulf of Morbihan, where the megalithic sites are part of local identity. A Coaster Set or a Small with a handwritten note from the studio travels well.

The piece reads warm-grey and umber against the coastal blues of the gulf. It carries wabi-sabi, coastal-modern, and stone-and-linen rooms especially well. The four-piece composition of the broken stone gives the eye somewhere to rest in a room of softer textures.

It reads as observational rather than mournful. The broken menhir has rested in that field for six thousand years; the piece reads as quiet, weight-bearing, and old, closer to a still-life than a memorial. It anchors a room without darkening it.

For a sofa, a single Large or a 4-tile Mural sits at the right scale. For a console, a Medium or a 9-tile Mural, depending on the wall height. The Mural formats let the four broken pieces of the original stone breathe across the wall.

Yes. Order the Dura Satin or Matte finish for any room with steam or splash. The colour lives in the ceramic surface itself, not on top of it, so daily kitchen and bathroom use is not a problem.

A microfibre cloth with plain water. Soft household soap if needed. No abrasives and no chemical cleaners. The thin glossy or satin finish is durable but does not benefit from scouring.

Yes. Reid Wender curates and finishes every piece in our Knoxville, Tennessee studio. The Locmariaquer painting is part of an ongoing European series. We do not license third-party art and we do not reproduce work made elsewhere.