Oldenburg
— — a residence town that kept its quiet.
Not only on a wall.
“An old ducal seat on the Hunte, surrounded by the flat green of the Ammerland. The Schloss still anchors the centre, the Lambertikirche still rings the hours, and the long pedestrian street between them carries bicycles more than cars. A working university town now, with a market square that fills on Saturdays and empties by dusk. The kind of place that doesn't need to announce itself. from the studio
Oldenburg, 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.
Oldenburg sits in the flat country of Lower Saxony, about 45 kilometres west of Bremen, on the Hunte river where it meets the old Küstenkanal. The city was the seat of the Counts and later Grand Dukes of Oldenburg from the twelfth century until 1918, and the Baroque Schloss at the centre still holds the state art and cultural-history museums. Today it is a university town of roughly 170,000 people, the third-largest in Lower Saxony after Hanover and Braunschweig.
The Lambertikirche on the market square carries the city's longest visible memory. A late-Gothic hall church from the fifteenth century was rebuilt in 1797 as a neoclassical rotunda inside the old walls, then given five brick spires in 1873 — the silhouette the city still uses on its postcards. A few streets away the Schloss, begun in 1607 under Count Anton Günther, holds a Baroque core wrapped in later wings. Both buildings shape the long axis of the inner city.
The pedestrian centre runs roughly from the Schloss south to the Lappan, a freestanding fourteenth-century bell tower that once marked the edge of the old town. The Saturday market on the Rathausmarkt is the city's social anchor and runs through the morning. Oldenburg lies on the regional rail line between Bremen and Wilhelmshaven, with hourly intercity service, and the Schlossgarten — one of the oldest English-style landscape parks in northern Germany — opens free of charge year-round during daylight hours.