Notre-Dame de Paris West Facade
— — the wall the city measures from.
Not only on a wall.
“The western front of the cathedral, facing the open parvis where every road in France is measured from a single brass marker set into the stones. Three deep sculpted portals across the bottom, twenty-eight kings of Judah in a row above them, the great rose window centred between the towers. The towers were planned to carry spires that were never built, so they stop short and square at sixty-nine metres. Late in the day the limestone goes gold and the rose holds the colour longest. The 2019 fire took the spire behind. This wall did not move.
Notre-Dame de Paris West Facade, 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.
The cathedral stands on the Île de la Cité, the small natural island in the Seine that has been the religious and administrative centre of Paris since Roman times. The west facade looks out across the parvis, a wide public square officially co-named Place Jean-Paul II in 2006, set above the archaeological crypt of ancient Lutetia. Set into the parvis in 1924 is Point Zéro des routes de France, a small brass-and-stone marker that is the official origin from which all distances on the country's national highways are measured. The cathedral is in the 4th arrondissement; the Métro stations Cité, Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame, and Hôtel de Ville sit within a few minutes' walk.
The west facade is High Gothic, composed in three horizontal registers and three vertical bays, a balance that later French cathedral builders treated as the canonical form. Its three sculpted portals are dedicated, from south to north, to Saint Anne, the Last Judgement, and the Virgin, carved between roughly 1200 and 1240. Above them runs the Gallery of Kings, twenty-eight stone figures of the kings of Judah. The originals were pulled down and decapitated in 1793, during the Revolution, when crowds mistook them for kings of France. Twenty-one of the medieval heads were recovered in 1977 from a private cellar near the Opéra and are now held at the Musée de Cluny. The figures on the facade today are nineteenth-century replacements installed during the long restoration led by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc between 1844 and 1864.
The cathedral reopened to the public on 7 December 2024, five years after the April 2019 fire that destroyed the spire and most of the timber roof but spared the west facade and the bell towers. Entry to the nave remains free, in keeping with French law for an active place of worship; timed online reservations through the official site cut the parvis queue, especially on weekends and during morning Mass. The climb to the south tower, where the great bell Emmanuel hangs, is more than 400 stone steps and is ticketed separately through the Centre des monuments nationaux. The Trésor in the sacristy and the archaeological crypt under the parvis each carry their own small fee. Flash photography is not permitted inside.