Kollam
— — the backwaters at the hour the herons come.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city on the Malabar Coast where Ashtamudi Lake fans out into eight long arms and the houseboats turn south toward Alappuzha. Quilon in the old Portuguese maps, an entrepôt for Chinese, Arab, and Roman traders a thousand years before that. Cashew warehouses still line the inland docks. The red-and-white Tangasseri lighthouse, lit in 1902, still works. from the studio
Kollam, 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.
Kollam is a coastal city in the southern Indian state of Kerala, on the Arabian Sea at the southern edge of Ashtamudi Lake. It is the headquarters of Kollam district and has a population of roughly 350,000. The old name Quilon appears on Portuguese, Dutch, and English maritime charts. The city was a major Malabar trading port from at least the ninth century and is still one of the principal southern gateways to the Kerala backwaters, with daily ferry service onward to Alappuzha.
Ashtamudi Lake, the name means eight braids, is the second-largest brackish wetland in Kerala and a Ramsar site since 2002. Its eight palm-shaped arms cover roughly 60 square kilometres and reach the Arabian Sea through the Neendakara estuary. The Kollam-to-Alappuzha state-run cruise covers about 80 kilometres of canals and lakes in roughly eight hours and is the longest scheduled backwaters route in Kerala. Kingfishers, darters, and grey herons work the channels at first and last light.
Kollam is the historic capital of the Indian cashew trade. The district handles a large share of the country's cashew processing, with most of the work concentrated in factories around the inland docks, many run by women's cooperatives. The Tangasseri lighthouse, a 41-metre red-and-white tower commissioned in 1902, sits on the old Portuguese-Dutch trading promontory; the colonial cemetery and the ruins of Saint Thomas Fort are within a short walk along the coast.