Tour Saint-Nicolas
— — stone that leaned, and held the harbour.
Not only on a wall.
“The keep on the south side of the entrance to La Rochelle's old harbour. Built on oak piles driven into Atlantic mud in the 14th century, the tower sank as it rose, leaning northeast, finding plumb again above the second floor. For three hundred years a chain ran from its base across the water to the Tour de la Chaîne, closing the port at night. The chain is gone. The lean is not. Stone the colour of old butter, six centuries of light moving across it, the salt wind doing what salt wind does.
Tour Saint-Nicolas, 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.
Tour Saint-Nicolas stands at the seaward entrance of the Vieux-Port of La Rochelle, the historic Atlantic harbour on France's central west coast, in the Charente-Maritime department of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. The keep rises 42 metres across five levels and is one of three surviving medieval towers, with the Tour de la Chaîne directly across the channel and the Tour de la Lanterne a short walk west along the seafront rampart. Construction began around 1340 and was complete by 1376. La Rochelle sits roughly 470 km southwest of Paris and 175 km north of Bordeaux; the TGV serves the city's central station, a fifteen-minute walk from the tower. The site is owned by the French state and managed by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
The Tour Saint-Nicolas is a circular keep with a spur and corner turrets, set on long oak piles driven into the soft harbour mud and braced with stones. As the masonry rose the foundations gave on one side and the lower stories tilted northeast; the masons widened the base, added a buttress, then corrected the build so the tower carries on plumb above the second floor. Locally it has earned the nickname la tour de Pise française. The interior is a labyrinth of corridors and staircases threaded through the thickness of the walls, serving four floors of vaulted and timbered rooms: a Gothic chapel, bedrooms with fireplaces and latrines, a captain's reception room. It was a fortress and a household in one. Listed a monument historique in 1879, the keep was restored between 1884 and 1904.
For three hundred years the tower's strategic value lay in what stretched from its base: a heavy iron chain operated by a winch, drawn across the harbour mouth to the Tour de la Chaîne and back, closing the Vieux-Port at night and during siege. The windlass that raised the chain was mounted inside the keep; sections of the original chain were dredged from the harbour bottom in the 19th century and kept at the foot of the tower. La Rochelle was a Huguenot stronghold during the Wars of Religion, and after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Tour Saint-Nicolas was used to hold Protestant prisoners. A century later, Vendeans were imprisoned here during the Revolutionary Wars of 1793–95.