Saint-Étienne
— — a working city the design world quietly watches.
Not only on a wall.
“A French industrial city in the hills southwest of Lyon, dark-stoned and steep-streeted, with the Furan running under much of it. Once the country's arms forge, then its bicycle and ribbon capital, now a UNESCO City of Design. The architecture is plain and serious. The light off the slate roofs in winter is the colour of a held breath, and the place is not at all charming, which is most of its character.
Saint-Étienne, 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.
Saint-Étienne is the prefecture of the Loire department in France's Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, about 60 kilometres southwest of Lyon, sitting at roughly 516 metres on the eastern edge of the Massif Central. The Furan river runs through the city, partly culverted under the centre. The commune holds about 170,000 inhabitants and the surrounding metropolitan area around 520,000, making it the largest urban centre in the Loire valley. The city grew along a narrow basin between the Pilat massif to the south and the Monts du Lyonnais to the north.
The building stock is overwhelmingly nineteenth-century industrial: dark sandstone and brick, long pitched slate roofs, factory courts converted to housing. Saint-Étienne was the centre of French arms manufacture from the seventeenth century — the Manufacture d'Armes de Saint-Étienne operated until 2001 — and later the country's leading bicycle and silk-ribbon producer. The Manufacture de Cycles Manufrance shaped whole quarters of the city. The Site Le Corbusier in nearby Firminy, completed posthumously between 1965 and 2006, holds the largest concentration of Le Corbusier buildings in Europe and remains the region's most-visited piece of modern architecture.
Since 2010 Saint-Étienne has held UNESCO Creative City of Design status, the first French city given the design designation. The Cité du Design occupies the former Manufacture d'Armes site and hosts the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne every two years, with the next edition scheduled for spring 2027. The biennale draws designers and schools from across Europe and is the city's main international moment. AS Saint-Étienne, the football club founded in 1919 and ten-time French champion, plays at the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard, locally called *le Chaudron*.