Petite France Strasbourg
— the wood leaning toward its own reflection.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest quarter of Strasbourg, where the river Ill splits into four channels and once ran the mills, the tanneries, and the fishermen's docks. The half-timbered houses date mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dark oak set into pale plaster, with steep roofs sloping toward the water so hides could be hung to dry. The whole Grande Île has been a UNESCO site since 1988. Most afternoons photographers gather on the Maison des Tanneurs footbridge for the same view they have come for since the cameras did. Nobody on the bridge says much.
Petite France Strasbourg, 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.
Petite France is the historic tanners', millers', and fishermen's quarter at the western tip of the Grande Île of Strasbourg, in the Bas-Rhin department of north-eastern France. The river Ill, a tributary of the Rhine, divides into four channels here before rejoining downstream of the cathedral; the quarter sits between those channels and is closed off to the west by the Ponts Couverts and the Barrage Vauban. Strasbourg is the historic capital of Alsace and the seat of the European Parliament, with a metropolitan population of roughly 500,000. The Grande Île, including Petite France, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988; the inscription was extended in 2017 to take in the German-era Neustadt to the north.
The half-timbered houses of Petite France date mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the quarter was home to Strasbourg's tanners, millers, and fishermen. The Maison des Tanneurs, completed in 1572 on the Rue du Bain-aux-Plantes, is the largest and best preserved of them, with a steep three-tier roof that originally served as a drying loft for hides above the workshops on the lower floors. Most of the neighbouring houses share the same vertical proportion: dark oak posts and braces set into pale plaster infill, with a roof pitch deep enough to vent the smell of the tanning pits beneath. The same colombage construction defines Alsatian architecture from Riquewihr to Eguisheim, but Petite France is its largest urban concentration.
Petite France is open at all hours and charges no admission. The quarter is a 10-minute walk west of Strasbourg Cathedral and easy to reach on foot from the central tram interchange at Homme de Fer. The clearest sightlines on the half-timbered houses are from the footbridge by the Maison des Tanneurs and from the open roof terrace of the Barrage Vauban, both free to the public. The narrow lanes around the Rue du Bain-aux-Plantes are pedestrian-only and busiest between June and September, and again through the Christkindelsmärik, the December Christmas market that draws roughly two million visitors to Strasbourg each year. The shoulder months are quieter, and the blue hour brings out the lit reflections along the canals.