Les Baux-de-Provence
— the village the limestone built and the wind kept.
Not only on a wall.
“A village built straight into the limestone of the Alpilles, with a ruined castle above the lanes and the old bauxite quarries below. The castle was pulled down on orders from Paris in 1633 and never rebuilt; the quarries have been turned into a hall of moving paintings, the colour climbing rock walls in the dark. About three hundred and seventy people live up here. Coaches arrive by mid-morning and thin out by dinner; the stones are quietest just after.
Les Baux-de-Provence, 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.
Les Baux-de-Provence sits on a limestone outcrop in the Alpilles, a low range of jagged hills in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France. The commune is small, roughly 18 square kilometres with around 370 residents, but it receives well over a million visitors a year, drawn to the castle ruins and the old bauxite quarries below. The village lies about 20 kilometres northeast of Arles and 30 kilometres south of Avignon, reachable from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by the D27. It is listed among Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, a national association of about 170 villages chosen for architectural and landscape integrity.
The mineral bauxite takes its name from Les Baux. In 1821 the French geologist Pierre Berthier identified a reddish ore at the foot of the village and named it after the place; the same ore today supplies most of the world's commercial aluminium. The castle on the spur dates from the 11th century and once held one of the most powerful lordly families in Provence, the House of Baux. After a long rebellion against Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu ordered the citadel demolished in 1633; what remains is a working ruin, walked over rather than restored. The lower village, the bourg below, kept its 16th-century Renaissance houses largely intact.
The village itself is freely accessible; the castle ruin (Château des Baux) and the Carrières de Lumières each charge admission and run roughly 9 to 6 in summer, shorter in winter. The Carrières, set in the old bauxite quarry galleries below the village, projects rotating immersive shows of work by single painters (Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Cézanne in past seasons) across rock walls about 14 metres high. Coaches arrive from Avignon and Marseille from late morning; the lanes are calmest at opening and after about 5pm. Mistral wind days carry far across the Alpilles, so a windbreaker matters even in July. The village closes early; most restaurants stop seating by 9pm.