Potsdam
— — the palaces the trees keep half a secret.
Not only on a wall.
“The old Prussian seat, half an hour from Berlin by S-Bahn, sitting on a chain of lakes and parkland along the Havel. Frederick the Great built his small summer palace, Sanssouci, on a terraced vineyard above the town in the 1740s, and the kings and emperors who followed kept adding parks and palaces around it. The grounds run for hectares under old plane and beech. The Dutch Quarter still has its red brick. The light through the pines is particular to this place. from the studio
Potsdam, 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.
Potsdam is the capital of the German state of Brandenburg, set about 25 kilometres southwest of Berlin on the Havel river and its chain of lakes. The city was the residence of the Prussian kings and German emperors from the eighteenth century to 1918 and is best known for the palaces and gardens of Sanssouci, built for Frederick the Great beginning in 1745. The Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1990 and now cover about 500 hectares across seventeen sites and roughly 150 buildings, the largest such ensemble in Germany.
Sanssouci itself is small, a single-storey rococo summer palace of about a dozen rooms, set above six terraced vineyards. It was designed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff to Frederick the Great's own sketches and completed in 1747. The later Neues Palais at the western end of the park is a different scale entirely, a brick-and-stone baroque pile of more than two hundred rooms built between 1763 and 1769. Schloss Cecilienhof, in the Neuer Garten, is the English-country-house-style residence where the Potsdam Conference was held in the summer of 1945.
Potsdam is reached from central Berlin in roughly 25 minutes on S-Bahn line S7 to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof. The parks are open daily and free; the palaces require timed-entry tickets, sold by the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten that manages the site. Sanssouci itself caps at a small number of visitors per slot and sells out in summer. The Holländisches Viertel, the Dutch Quarter of 134 red-brick houses built in the 1730s for Dutch craftsmen, lies in the old town centre about a kilometre from the park gate.