Nice
— — the colour that named a coast.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on a half-moon bay, where the Maritime Alps meet the Mediterranean and the water reads a blue that earned the coast its name. The Promenade des Anglais runs the long arc of the Baie des Anges; behind it, the lanes of Vieux Nice climb toward the ochre houses and the castle hill above the old port. Matisse and Chagall both kept studios here. The light explains why. — from the studio
Nice, 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.
Nice sits on the Baie des Anges in the Alpes-Maritimes département of south-east France, about 30 kilometres west of the Italian border and at the foot of the Maritime Alps. It is the fifth-largest city in France and the historic capital of the County of Nice, which belonged to the House of Savoy until 1860, when the population voted by plebiscite to join France under Napoleon III. UNESCO inscribed the city in 2021 as a Winter Resort Town of the Riviera, recognising the international villa-and-promenade architecture that grew along the bay from the mid-19th century.
The bay's particular blue is what gave the coast the name Côte d'Azur, coined by the writer Stéphen Liégeard in 1887. The colour comes from a combination of deep, clear water close to shore, low river-silt input compared to the Atlantic coasts, and the steep underwater shelf that drops away from the pebble beach. The pebbles themselves, smoothed quartzite carried down by the Var and Paillon rivers, give the surf its characteristic clatter. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 and stayed almost forty years, in large part because of this light on this water.
The Promenade des Anglais runs roughly seven kilometres along the bay, from the airport in the west to the foot of the Colline du Château in the east. It was first laid as a coastal path in 1820, paid for by British residents wintering on the Riviera, and gives the city its central spine. Vieux Nice, the old town, climbs north from the promenade in narrow lanes of ochre and rose façades; the daily market on Cours Saleya runs flowers six days a week and antiques on Mondays. The Colline du Château offers the highest free view across the bay and the red-tile roofs.