Hagen
— — a steel city that turned toward art.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of about 190,000 in North Rhine-Westphalia, set where the wooded valleys of the Sauerland open into the Ruhr industrial basin. Two rivers, the Volme and the Lenne, meet in the centre of town. Hagen was the home of Karl Ernst Osthaus, who in the early twentieth century turned a steel-rolling city into a small capital of the modern movement. The Hohenhof villa, designed by Henry van de Velde, still sits on the hill above the river.
Hagen, 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.
Hagen is an independent city of about 188,000 residents in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, at the southeastern edge of the Ruhr metropolitan region. It lies at the confluence of the Volme and Lenne rivers, with the Ennepe joining from the west, and stands at the gateway between the industrial Ruhr to the north and the wooded hills of the Sauerland to the south. The city is best known for the Hagen Impulse, the early-twentieth-century cultural programme initiated by the banker and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus, which brought Jugendstil and early Modernist architecture to the Ruhr.
The Hohenhof, built between 1906 and 1908 to designs by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, sits on a wooded ridge above the Volme valley. It was the private home of Osthaus and is considered one of the most complete Jugendstil Gesamtkunstwerke in Germany, with interior furnishings by van de Velde himself, stained glass by Johan Thorn Prikker, and a relief by Aristide Maillol. The house is now a museum operated by the Osthaus Museum Hagen and is open to the public on weekend afternoons.
The LWL Open-Air Museum at Selbecke, on the southern edge of the city, preserves more than sixty historical workshops along a narrow stream valley: a paper mill, a forge, a brewery, a rope walk, all working machinery. The museum opened in 1973 and runs from April through October. In the city centre the Osthaus Museum and the adjacent Emil Schumacher Museum, in a glass cube building completed in 2009, hold the collection Osthaus assembled and the postwar abstract paintings of Schumacher, a native of Hagen.