Grande Chartreuse
— — the silence the order has kept for nine hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“The head monastery of the Carthusian Order, set in a narrow valley of the Chartreuse Massif, surrounded by limestone cliffs and beech forest. The buildings are closed to visitors; the monks live in solitary cells around a great cloister and gather only for night office. The road ends a few kilometres short of the gates. A separate museum at La Correrie explains the way of life. From below, the slate roofs and the steeple read as a single line under the cliffs.
Grande Chartreuse, 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.
La Grande Chartreuse is the mother house of the Carthusian Order, founded in 1084 by Saint Bruno of Cologne and six companions in a remote valley of the Chartreuse Mountains. It lies in the commune of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, in the Isère department of southeastern France, about 25 kilometres north of Grenoble. The current buildings, largely rebuilt in the seventeenth century after a series of fires, sit at roughly 950 metres elevation within the Parc naturel régional de Chartreuse. The monastery itself is closed to the public; the order has held a vow of silence and seclusion for more than nine centuries.
Carthusian life is the strictest contemplative form in the Western Church. Monks live in individual two-storey cells around a great cloister, eating, working, and praying alone six days a week, gathering only for the night office and Sunday meals. They speak only on the weekly recreation walk. The 2005 film Into Great Silence, by Philip Gröning, was filmed inside the monastery over six months without commentary, music, or interview, and remains the only modern visual record of the life within.
Visitors stop at the Musée de la Grande Chartreuse, two kilometres short of the monastery in the former guesthouse of La Correrie. The museum opens from April through November and presents the architecture, the cell life, and the history of the order. The monastery itself remains closed; the road past the museum is barred to public traffic. The famous green and yellow Chartreuse liqueurs, still produced under the order's recipe of 130 herbs, are now distilled at Aiguenoire near Voiron rather than at the monastery.