Tel Aviv
— — a white city the sea keeps writing back to.
Not only on a wall.
“Founded in 1909 on sand dunes north of the old port of Jaffa, Tel Aviv grew into a city of pale Bauhaus blocks above a fourteen-kilometre stretch of Mediterranean shore. The promenade runs from the old harbour at Jaffa up past Frishman and Gordon beaches. Cafes hold the corners; the sea wind keeps the streets cool through the long summers. A city built fast, photographed at the hour the light finds the white walls.
Tel Aviv, 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.
Tel Aviv-Yafo sits on the central Mediterranean coast of Israel, formed in 1950 by the merger of Tel Aviv, founded in 1909 on dunes north of Jaffa, with the ancient port city of Jaffa itself. The combined municipality covers fifty-two square kilometres along fourteen kilometres of coastline and holds a population near four hundred and seventy thousand. The wider metropolitan area, Gush Dan, exceeds four million. It is Israel's economic and cultural centre, home to the country's stock exchange and most of its tech sector.
The White City of Tel Aviv carries UNESCO World Heritage listing for the largest concentration of Bauhaus and International Style buildings in the world: more than four thousand structures built between the 1930s and 1950s, mostly by architects trained at the Bauhaus school in Germany who emigrated after 1933. The buildings share flat roofs, ribbon windows, curved balconies, and pale render adapted to the Mediterranean sun. South along the coast, the stone alleys of Old Jaffa step down toward the harbour and trace continuously back over four thousand years.
The climate is hot-summer Mediterranean. Summers from June through September run hot and humid, with daytime highs near thirty and nights staying warm above twenty. Winters are mild and wet, with most of the year's roughly five hundred and thirty millimetres of rain falling between November and March. The sea breeze sets in most afternoons and keeps the promenade walkable through the long summer. Sea temperature stays above twenty degrees from May through November, the longest swimming season on this stretch of coast.