Versailles Parterre
— — the king's geometry, in boxwood and water.
Not only on a wall.
“The parterres of Versailles. Geometry cut into the field west of the palace; boxwood pressed into embroidery patterns the eye reads as fabric. Two long mirror pools hold the sky on the upper terrace, edged by bronze rivers cast by the Keller brothers. Below them, the Latona basin steps down toward the canal in a line André Le Nôtre held to for forty years. The crushed gravel between the hedges turns the colour of pale flour in summer light. On the days the fountains run, the water joins the geometry. The rest of the year it is a quiet shape above the canal, with Paris somewhere beyond it.
Versailles Parterre, 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.
The Parterre d'Eau and the surrounding formal gardens sit on the terrace immediately west of the Château de Versailles, in the commune of Versailles, about 20 kilometres southwest of Paris. The grounds were laid out by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV beginning in 1661; Le Nôtre continued working on them until his death in 1700. The whole estate spans roughly 800 hectares, of which the formal parterres are the central organising idiom: geometry cut into the field along the east-west axis the king had set for himself. The Palace and Park of Versailles were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979. The gardens lie in Yvelines, Île-de-France.
The Parterre d'Eau is the pair of large rectangular pools laid into the upper terrace directly behind the Hall of Mirrors, completed in their present form in the mid-1680s to designs by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Charles Le Brun. The pools are ringed by bronze figures cast by the brothers Jean-Balthazar and Jean-Jacques Keller, eight of which personify the rivers of France: the Seine, the Marne, the Loire, the Loiret, the Saône, the Rhône, the Garonne, and the Dordogne. Below them, the Latona Fountain steps down toward the Grand Canal, its marble group by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy from 1668 to 1670, restored between 2012 and 2015. On Grandes Eaux days, the geometry the eye reads in stillness becomes geometry the ear reads in falling water.
The gardens are open daily, with longer hours from April through October and reduced hours in winter; the schedule shifts year to year and is posted on the Château's official site. Admission to the gardens is free except on Grandes Eaux Musicales and Jardins Musicaux days, when an entry fee applies. The Grandes Eaux Musicales run on Saturdays and Sundays from late March to late October, with additional Tuesday performances in summer; on these days the fountains are switched on for choreographed sequences set to Baroque music piped through the bosquets. The Palace itself requires a separate timed ticket. The nearest station is Versailles Château Rive Gauche, terminus of the RER C line from central Paris, a forty-minute ride.