Palace of Fontainebleau
— — the staircase Napoleon walked down for the last time.
Not only on a wall.
“A working royal residence for almost eight centuries, from Louis VII to Napoleon III. The horseshoe staircase in the Cour des Adieux is where Napoleon said goodbye to his Old Guard in April 1814. The forest around it, the Forêt de Fontainebleau, has been a hunting ground for kings and a climbing ground for Parisians since the 1800s. Coaches from Paris stop in the Cour Ovale and the gravel takes the sound out of footsteps.
Palace of Fontainebleau, 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 Château de Fontainebleau stands 55 kilometres southeast of Paris, in the town of Fontainebleau in Seine-et-Marne. Every French sovereign from Louis VII in the twelfth century to Napoleon III in the nineteenth used it as a residence. The complex carries roughly 1,500 rooms across four main courtyards and 130 acres of gardens and park. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1981. The surrounding Forêt de Fontainebleau covers about 280 square kilometres of oak, beech, and sandstone, and is one of the oldest protected forests in France.
The architecture reads as eight centuries of accretion rather than a single hand. Francis I rebuilt the medieval keep beginning in 1528 and brought Italian masters — Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio — to fresco the Galerie François I, the first room of its kind in France. The Escalier en Fer-à-cheval, the double-curved horseshoe staircase in the entrance court, was designed by Jean Androuet du Cerceau and finished in 1634. Later wings under Henry IV, Louis XIV, and Napoleon I layered onto the same footprint, in the local Fontainebleau sandstone the forest is named for.
Trains run from Gare de Lyon to Fontainebleau-Avon in about 40 minutes, then a short bus or 25-minute walk to the gates. The château is open every day except Tuesday, with the standard adult ticket at €14 in 2026. The grounds and the Cour des Adieux are free to walk year-round. Inside, the route runs through the Grand Apartments, Napoleon's apartments, and the Galerie de Diane. The Forêt de Fontainebleau, with more than 300 kilometres of marked trails, is the original site of bouldering as a sport.