Palais Garnier Grand Staircase
— a staircase built to be a room.
Not only on a wall.
“Charles Garnier's idea was that the climb mattered as much as the opera. The Grand Escalier rises thirty metres under a painted dome, double-sweep in white Italian marble with green and red balustrades, designed so the audience could watch the audience. Bronze candelabra at the foot, four ceiling panels by Isidore Pils overhead, every balcony a viewing gallery for the people coming up. Half the room is staircase and half the room is theatre about staircases. The Paris Opera still holds galas here. Most visitors stop at the first landing and look up before they remember to keep climbing.
Palais Garnier Grand Staircase, 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.
Charles Garnier won the 1861 competition to design a new opera house for Napoleon III as part of Baron Haussmann's reshaping of Paris, and the Palais Garnier opened on the Place de l'Opéra in the 9th arrondissement on 5 January 1875. The Grand Staircase is the building's central interior: a thirty-metre-high hall of white Italian marble with balustrades in coloured marbles, rising in a double-sweep from the entry vestibule to the foyer levels above. Four allegorical ceiling panels by Isidore Pils cover the dome. The building is today the home of the Paris Opera Ballet and one of two houses of the Opéra National de Paris, the second being the larger Opéra Bastille across the city.
Garnier specified marbles from across Europe for the Palais Garnier, and the Grand Staircase is where the showiest of them meet. The treads are white Italian Carrara; the balustrades carry the rose-and-russet veining of Sarrancolin marble from the French Pyrenees, the same stone that lines the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Green and dark red marbles fill the lower walls and the base of the balustrade. The stone budget was famously the line item that broke the original construction budget, delaying the opera's opening by a full decade. Every upward glance is, in part, at money.
The dome above the staircase rises thirty metres and is painted across four panels by Isidore Pils, with Apollo and Minerva and an allegory of the City of Paris receiving the plan of the new opera house. Bronze candelabra at the foot of the perron carry torch-light in cupped hands; the original gaslight has been replaced by electric flame-bulbs that still pulse and warm the marble. At a gala the room glows the colour of brandy. At a Tuesday morning visit the same room reads cool and grey-pink, with only the painted ceiling holding the warmth.