Kassel
— — the city the Grimms wrote down.
Not only on a wall.
“Kassel sits on the Fulda in central Germany, the city where Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected their tales. Every five years the documenta exhibition fills its halls and parks with contemporary art. Above town, the Bergpark cascades down from a copper Hercules — water on Wednesdays and Sundays in summer, the hour kept since the eighteenth century.
Kassel, 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.
Kassel is a city of roughly 200,000 in northern Hesse, central Germany, set where the Fulda River bends below the wooded hills of Habichtswald. It was levelled in 1943 and rebuilt around its older bones — the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe on the western slope, the Karlsaue meadow on the river, the Brüder-Grimm-Platz in between. The city is reached by ICE rail from Frankfurt in about ninety minutes, or from Berlin in under three hours. The Brothers Grimm lived here from 1798 and assembled their first volume of tales in a house above the Aue.
Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe was laid out from 1696 by Landgrave Karl, who carried Italian baroque ideas onto a Hessian hillside. Water released at the foot of the copper Hercules falls through a sequence of stone cascades, an aqueduct, and finally a sixteen-storey fountain in the lower pond — a drop of about three hundred metres. The display runs Wednesdays, Sundays and holidays from May through October, beginning at 14:30. The park entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2013, the first European cultural landscape inscribed for its water gardens alone.
documenta, held every five years since 1955, is one of the most consequential exhibitions in contemporary art; the next edition, documenta 16, opens in summer 2027. Kassel's permanent museums — the Grimmwelt above the Weinberg, the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe's Old Masters gallery, the Neue Galerie — stay open between editions. The Grimmwelt is closed Mondays. Bergpark itself is free and open year-round. ICE service from Frankfurt to Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe runs roughly every hour.