Bois de Boulogne Lake
— the long afternoon between two islands.
Not only on a wall.
“The larger of the two lakes inside the Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of Paris. Two small wooded islands sit in the middle, connected to each other by a footbridge. A free electric ferry runs across to the Chalet des Îles, a restaurant that has been there since the time of Napoleon III. Rowboats can be rented from the boathouse on the eastern shore from spring through autumn. The plane trees along the bank are old. On a weekday morning in October the lake reads more like a country pond than a piece of the sixteenth arrondissement.
Bois de Boulogne Lake, 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.
The Bois de Boulogne covers 846 hectares on the western edge of Paris, more than twice the area of Central Park. It was redesigned under Napoleon III between 1852 and 1858, with landscape architect Adolphe Alphand overseeing the work to convert a degraded royal hunting forest into a public park modelled in part on Hyde Park in London. The Lac Inférieur, the larger of the park's two lakes, was excavated as part of that programme. Two small wooded islands sit in the middle of the water, connected to one another by a wooden footbridge. The whole park lies inside the 16th arrondissement, bordered by Boulogne-Billancourt to the south and Neuilly-sur-Seine to the north.
A free electric ferry crosses from the eastern shore to the larger of the two islands, where the Chalet des Îles restaurant has operated in some form since the Second Empire. The boathouse on the eastern shore rents rowboats from spring through autumn, weather permitting. The park itself is open at all hours, though the lake's amenities follow daylight. The nearest Métro stops are Avenue Henri-Martin on line 9 and Porte Dauphine on line 2, each about a fifteen-minute walk to the shore. The lake is roughly a kilometre long and a hundred metres across at its widest point.
From April through November the lake is in season. In April and May the plane trees and chestnuts along the bank come into leaf and the rowboat rentals begin in earnest. June and July fill the boathouse pier with weekend traffic and the ferry can run a fifteen-minute wait. From late September through November the canopy turns yellow and copper and the weekday water reflects more of the colour than the boats. The park's two horse-racing courses, Longchamp and Auteuil, bracket the autumn race calendar, drawing crowds to the southern end of the wood but leaving the lake itself quiet on those mornings. Winter freezes are rare in Paris; the water stays open most cold years.