Monet's Pink House Giverny
— the pink the painter kept for himself.
Not only on a wall.
“The house Claude Monet bought in 1890, after renting it for seven years. He chose the colour himself. A soft rose pink for the walls, a bright green for the shutters that runs through the garden's benches and the Japanese bridge in the water garden. He lived here for forty-three years and died in the upstairs bedroom in 1926. The property went quiet for half a century before the Fondation Monet restored it and reopened the gardens to visitors in 1980. The gardens get most of the postcards. The house is the thing he came home to.
Monet's Pink House Giverny, 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.
Giverny is a commune in the Eure department of Normandy, about 80 kilometres west of Paris on the right bank of the Seine where the river meets the Epte. Claude Monet rented the property in 1883 and bought it in 1890, expanding it over four decades into two distinct gardens: the flower beds of the Clos Normand in front of the house, and the water garden across the road, fed by an arm of the Epte that Monet diverted with permission from the local council. The Fondation Claude Monet operates the property today, which reopened to the public in 1980 after a long restoration led by Gérald Van der Kemp. Vernon, the closest market town with a rail link to Paris Saint-Lazare, sits about five kilometres west.
The pink walls and bright green woodwork are Claude Monet's own colour choices. After buying the property in 1890, he had the limestone façade painted a soft rose and extended the same green across the shutters, the front door, the trellis on the porch, the benches in the garden, the Japanese footbridge that crosses the water lily pond, and the planks of the small boat he kept on the pond. Inside, the colour scheme continues: a kitchen tiled in blue and white, a dining room in saturated yellow, a sitting room hung floor to ceiling with the Japanese woodblock prints he had been collecting since the 1870s. The house reads as one of his palettes arranged around the rooms he actually lived in.
The gardens open on the first day of April and close at the start of November, mirroring the bloom calendar Claude Monet designed so something is in flower from spring through autumn. Tulips and forget-me-nots carry April. May brings the iris beds and the wisteria over the Japanese bridge. June and July are the peak weeks for the water lilies on the pond and the roses on the Grande Allée trellis. By August the dahlias and sunflowers dominate the Clos Normand. The house and gardens close to visitors in winter for cleaning, replanting, and the slow rebuilding of the displays: about five months of work to prepare for the next April opening.