Maison Carrée
— — a Roman room, still standing.
Not only on a wall.
“A Roman temple in Nîmes, in the south of France, built around 16 BCE and still standing whole on its original podium. Augustus dedicated it to his two young grandsons, Gaius and Lucius. The six Corinthian columns at the front have looked down on the square for two thousand years; Thomas Jefferson copied the form for the Virginia State Capitol.
Maison Carrée, 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.
The Maison Carrée stands in the centre of Nîmes, in the Gard department of southern France, about a kilometre from the city's Roman amphitheatre. Built during the reign of Augustus around 16 BCE, it was dedicated to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar, who both died young. The building is a hexastyle pseudoperipteral temple in the Corinthian order, raised on a podium with a deep portico at the east end. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2023 as the most complete surviving Roman temple of its kind.
The temple is built of local limestone from the quarries at Barutel, north of the city. The six front columns and the engaged columns of the cella walls still stand to their full Corinthian height, with capitals showing the carved acanthus leaves. The frieze and cornice run unbroken around the building. The original cella roof was rebuilt during the medieval period when the temple served as a church, and the building passed through several uses before nineteenth-century restoration returned it to public display.
The building has been continuously occupied for two thousand years, which is why it survives. After Roman use it served as a Christian church from the fourth century, then as a private house, a stable for the canons of Nîmes Cathedral, the seat of the city's consuls, an Augustinian convent, and during the Revolution as a departmental archive. It has been a public monument since the nineteenth century and now houses a short film on the founding of Nîmes inside the cella.