Lille
— — a Flemish town that wandered south.
Not only on a wall.
“A city the maps call French and the bricks call Flemish. Red gables on the Grand Place, the Vieille Bourse courtyard with its booksellers, the bell tower at the belfry counting the hour. The light through November rain has its own colour here, a wet ochre that sits well on stone. The Eurostar gets in before the cafés finish opening. from the studio
Lille, 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.
Lille sits in the Nord département of Hauts-de-France, about 14 kilometres from the Belgian border and an hour by TGV from Paris. The city proper holds roughly 236,000 people; the surrounding métropole pushes past 1.1 million, making it France's fourth-largest urban area. The two stations, Lille-Flandres and Lille-Europe, sit a few minutes' walk apart and connect onward to London, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The historic core, Vieux-Lille, kept its Flemish brick after the city passed from Spanish to French hands in 1667.
The signature building is the Vieille Bourse, the old stock exchange, completed in 1653 under Spanish rule and folded into a square of 24 small houses around a courtyard. Today the courtyard holds a daily book market and weekly chess players. A short walk away, the Palais des Beaux-Arts holds the second-largest fine arts collection in France after the Louvre, with work by Rubens, Goya, and Donatello in a Belle Époque shell rebuilt in the 1990s.
The first weekend of September empties the apartments and fills the streets: the Braderie de Lille, dated to the twelfth century, is among the largest flea markets in Europe, drawing two to three million people across roughly 100 kilometres of stalls. Restaurants pile mussel shells outside their doors and the winner is judged by the height of the heap. Outside the Braderie, the calendar runs quieter — Christmas market in December, a steady cadence of student life from the three universities.