place Vendôme
— an octagon ringed in jewellery windows.
Not only on a wall.
“An octagonal square in the 1st arrondissement, between the Opéra and the Tuileries. Jules Hardouin-Mansart drew the façades for Louis XIV; the column in the middle came a century later, with Napoleon. Today the ground floors are jewellery: Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef. The Ritz holds the western flank. At dusk the limestone takes the lamplight and the whole square goes amber.
place Vendôme, 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.
Place Vendôme is an octagonal public square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, laid out between 1699 and 1720 to the design of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Louis XIV's chief architect. The square measures roughly 224 by 213 metres and was originally conceived around an equestrian statue of the Sun King, melted during the Revolution. It sits two blocks north of the Tuileries Garden, with rue de la Paix running north from its opening toward the Palais Garnier.
The façades are cut from Parisian limestone in the high classical mode: pilasters, mansard roofs, arched ground-floor arcades. At the centre rises the Vendôme Column, 44 metres tall, raised by Napoleon in 1810 to commemorate Austerlitz. Its bronze plates were cast from captured Austrian and Russian cannons and wrapped in a spiral relief modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome. The Communards toppled the column in 1871; it was rebuilt three years later, and a replica statue of Napoleon now stands on top.
The square is open public space at any hour and carries no admission. The nearest Métro stops are Opéra, Tuileries, and Madeleine, each about five minutes' walk. Ground-floor windows belong almost entirely to haute joaillerie: Cartier, Boucheron, Chaumet, Van Cleef & Arpels. The Ritz Paris has occupied the western side since 1898. The square stays handsome through the year, but the limestone is at its warmest in late-afternoon autumn light, before the Christmas illuminations go up in November.