Saint-Malo Intra-Muros
— the wall the tide comes for, twice a day.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled port on Brittany's granite coast, set on a headland where the Rance opens to the Channel. The ramparts were Vauban's; the houses behind them were rebuilt after 1944 from the same grey stone, cut to the proportions of the streets they replaced. Some of the largest tides in Europe come and go twice a day at the foot of the walls. People walk the circuit. At low water a sand causeway uncovers to Grand Be, where Chateaubriand is buried facing the open sea. Six hours later the path is gone. Nobody hurries here.
Saint-Malo Intra-Muros, 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.
Saint-Malo Intra-Muros is the walled old town of Saint-Malo, a port on the Cote d'Emeraude in Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany, where the Rance estuary opens to the English Channel. The site is a granite headland that was effectively an island until the isthmus to the mainland, the Sillon, was permanently raised in the early eighteenth century. Saint-Malo was the home port of the French corsairs, including Robert Surcouf and Rene Duguay-Trouin, and the birthplace of the navigator Jacques Cartier, whose first voyage west sailed from here in 1534. The cathedral of Saint-Vincent, founded in the twelfth century, anchors the street grid. The commune today has about 46,000 residents.
The town reads as granite: walls, churches, houses, all in the local grey stone. The ramparts were extended and rebuilt under Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban after 1689, the period that gave the fortifications their present line and the height that lets the sentry walk look down on the Channel. In August 1944, during the liberation, fighting and shellfire destroyed roughly eighty percent of the houses inside the walls. The town was rebuilt across the following two decades under the architect Louis Arretche, dressed back in granite cut to the proportions of the eighteenth-century streets it replaced. The seam between old wall and new house is, in places, hard to find.
The Bay of Saint-Malo carries some of the largest tidal ranges in Europe; spring tides commonly reach about twelve metres, with extremes near fourteen. Twice a day the receding tide exposes a sand causeway to the rocky islet of Grand Be, where the writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand asked to be buried in 1848, facing the open sea. A neighbouring islet, Petit Be, holds a Vauban-era fort; both are walkable only at low water and cut off for hours either side. At the foot of the ramparts the Plage de Bon Secours has a stone-walled tidal pool that fills and empties on the same cycle. The current along the walls is real; the posted tide table is the local clock.