Marseille
— — the south wind off the water, and the limestone above.
Not only on a wall.
“France's oldest city, founded by Greek sailors from Phocaea around 600 BC and still a working port. The Vieux-Port cuts inland between the old quarter and the limestone hills; above it, Notre-Dame de la Garde catches first light. The bouillabaisse arrives with the broth poured separately, and the mistral has its own season. — from the studio
Marseille, 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.
Marseille sits on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, in the southeast corner of France, anchoring the Bouches-du-Rhône department and the wider Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. The metropolitan population is about 1.6 million, making it France's second-largest city after Paris. Founded around 600 BCE by Greek colonists from Phocaea as Massalia, it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in France. The Vieux-Port — the natural harbour the Greeks chose — still cuts inland from the Mediterranean into the urban core, with the city climbing the limestone hills on either side.
The city's signature stone is the pale Cassis limestone quarried just along the coast, which has built quays, churches, and the famous calanques of the national park to the south. Notre-Dame de la Garde stands 162 metres above the harbour on a limestone outcrop, completed in 1864 in a Romano-Byzantine design by Henri Espérandieu. The Fort Saint-Jean and Fort Saint-Nicolas guard the mouth of the Vieux-Port; the newer Mucem, opened in 2013, sits in a lattice of cast concrete that reads against the older stone.
Provence is famous for its light, and Marseille shows it clearly: a hard, salt-washed brightness off the Mediterranean that flattens midday and lengthens fast in the afternoon. The mistral, the cold dry wind that funnels down the Rhône valley, sweeps the sky to a strong cobalt for days at a stretch — Cézanne and the Fauves both painted in it. The best hour for the city is the last forty minutes of daylight, when the limestone above the port turns from white to amber and the harbour below holds the warm cast.