Bad Homburg vor der Höhe
— — the spa town the kings kept coming back to.
Not only on a wall.
“A spa town on the south slope of the Taunus, half an hour by S-Bahn from Frankfurt. Mineral springs feed the old Kurpark, and the white columns of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad still stand where Edward VII took the waters. Dostoyevsky lost a year of pages at the casino, then wrote about it. The chestnut trees along the Hauptallee shade most of the long walk through the park. — from the studio
Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, 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.
Bad Homburg vor der Höhe is the seat of the Hochtaunuskreis district in Hesse, about seventeen kilometres north of Frankfurt am Main. Roughly 55,000 people live on the south slope of the Taunus range at an elevation near 200 metres. The S-Bahn line S5 connects it to Frankfurt central station in about thirty minutes. The Landgraves of Hesse-Homburg held the town as a small principality until 1866, and the baroque Schloss Homburg still anchors the upper old town.
The town's twelve mineral and brine springs gave it the prefix Bad, granted in 1912 when the German title formally recognised it as a spa. The Elisabethenbrunnen pavilion in the Kurpark still draws warm sodium-chloride water that gave the Homburg cure its reputation in the nineteenth century. The 44-hectare Kurpark itself was laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné, the Prussian landscape architect who shaped the Tiergarten in Berlin. Long gravel allées, a Siamese temple, and a Russian chapel mark the years the European nobility came to take the waters.
Bad Homburg's Spielbank, the casino founded by the Blanc brothers in 1841, helped invent the modern roulette table and gave Monte Carlo its model when the German Empire banned gaming in 1872. Dostoyevsky played and lost here in the 1860s and drew on the experience for The Gambler. The casino reopened in 1949 and still runs in a wing of the Kurhaus. The Saalburg Roman fort, a reconstructed Limes castellum from the late nineteenth century, sits about seven kilometres north of the town in the Taunus.