Essen
— the city the mines became.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in the Ruhr, in western Germany, that spent a hundred years pulling coal and casting steel for the rest of Europe. The Zollverein Colliery, once the world's largest hard-coal mine, closed in 1986, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2001, and is now an art and design quarter. The Krupp villa stands on a wooded ridge above the river. — from the studio
Essen, 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.
Essen sits in the centre of the Ruhr metropolitan region, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany. The city holds about 580,000 people and anchors a continuous urban area of more than five million. From the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth, Essen was the headquarters of the Krupp steel empire and one of Europe's primary coal-mining centres. The collapse of heavy industry in the 1980s reshaped the city into a hub for services, design, and culture; Essen served as a European Capital of Culture in 2010.
The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, on the city's northern edge, was once the largest hard-coal mine in the world. Built in stages from 1847 and rebuilt in the Bauhaus-influenced New Objectivity style by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer in 1932, the colliery closed in 1986 and the coking plant in 1993. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2001. The Red Dot Design Museum now occupies the former boiler house, and the SANAA-designed school of management sits on the grounds.
Zollverein is open daily and free to walk; the museums on the site have their own hours and tickets. The Villa Hügel, the Krupp family's 269-room mansion in the Bredeney district, opens Tuesday to Sunday and overlooks the Baldeneysee. The Museum Folkwang, rebuilt to a David Chipperfield design in 2010, holds one of Germany's strongest collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art. Essen Hauptbahnhof is a major ICE hub, with direct trains to Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Berlin.