Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle
— — pink sandstone, holding the long horizon.
Not only on a wall.
“The high pink sandstone fortress on a spur above the Alsace plain. The Hohenstaufens raised the first walls here in the twelfth century. The Swedes burned it in 1633, and it sat as a ruin for two hundred and sixty-seven years. Then Kaiser Wilhelm II had it rebuilt, between 1900 and 1908, by the architect Bodo Ebhardt. The roof is tiled in patterns. The hall is hung with halberds. On a clear day the keep looks east to the Black Forest. On the cleanest days of winter, south to the Alps. The pink stone holds the light differently than the limestone castles further west.
Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle, 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.
Haut-Koenigsbourg sits at 757 metres on a rocky spur of the Vosges, in the commune of Orschwiller, twelve kilometres west of Sélestat in France's Grand Est region. The site has been fortified since at least 1147, when the first castle was raised by the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Burned by Swedish troops in 1633 during the Thirty Years' War, it stood ruined for nearly three centuries. The town of Sélestat presented the ruin to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1899 (Alsace was then part of the German Empire), and the emperor commissioned the architect Bodo Ebhardt to rebuild it. Construction ran from 1900 to 1908. Ownership returned to France under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and the castle is today classified a Monument historique.
The castle is built from the local pink sandstone of the Vosges, the same warm rose-grey stone that gives Strasbourg Cathedral its colour. The plan is long and narrow, roughly 270 metres along its main axis, wrapped around a great keep and a long bastion. Bodo Ebhardt's 1900-1908 reconstruction worked from the surviving walls and from late-medieval architectural treatises, with the keep raised to its likely fifteenth-century height. The polychrome roof tiles, the gabled keep, and the weapons hall (the Salle des Armes, hung with armour and halberds) are part of his synthesis. Critics have argued the result reveals as much about 1900 as it does about 1450.
Haut-Koenigsbourg is one of the most visited castles in France, drawing more than 500,000 visitors a year. The site opens every day except January 1 and December 25, with hours that shift by season, short in winter and long through the summer. From the upper terrace the view runs east across the Alsace plain to the Black Forest in Germany, north along the Vosges crest, and on the clearest winter days south to the Alps. The drive up from the wine villages of the Route des Vins takes about twenty minutes from Sélestat. A shuttle bus from Sélestat railway station runs in season.