Palace of Versailles
— — the room the century looked at itself in.
Not only on a wall.
“Louis XIV moved his court here in 1682 and held it for a hundred and seven years. The Hall of Mirrors runs seventy-three metres along the garden front, three hundred and fifty-seven mirrors facing the same number of windows. Le Nôtre's parterres still hold the geometry he drew on the marsh. The Sun King's idea of the world, made walkable.
Palace of Versailles, 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 Versailles sits about twenty kilometres southwest of Paris in the Yvelines department. Louis XIV transformed his father's hunting lodge into the seat of the French court, moving the government here in May 1682. The complex now covers roughly 800 hectares of gardens, formal canals, the Grand and Petit Trianons, and the queen's hamlet. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and draws roughly 10 million visitors a year, second only to the Eiffel Tower among French monuments.
The Galerie des Glaces runs seventy-three metres along the garden facade, completed in 1684 to designs by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Charles Le Brun. Three hundred and fifty-seven mirrors face seventeen arched windows that look west over the parterre and the Grand Canal. The mirrors were among the largest produced in Europe at the time, made at the Manufacture royale des Glaces de miroirs at Saint-Gobain to break the Venetian monopoly. Late-afternoon sun crosses the room and the gilt ceiling lights up across its full length.
The estate opens Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays and a handful of public holidays. A timed-entry ticket for the château runs around 21 euros; passport tickets covering the Trianons and the Coach Gallery cost more. The musical fountain shows operate weekends from April through October, when the garden hydraulics — substantially the same machinery that astonished seventeenth-century visitors — bring the fountains alive. Versailles Château Rive Gauche station on RER Line C sits a ten-minute walk from the main gate.