Kyoto
— — a city that kept its quieter rooms.
Not only on a wall.
“The old capital, held in a basin ringed on three sides by low mountains. Imperial seat from 794 to 1868, spared the firebombs that took most other Japanese cities in 1945, and still carrying about 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines inside the city limits. Bamboo groves at Arashiyama in the morning, the worn stone steps of Higashiyama in the afternoon, the smell of wet cedar after a Kamogawa River rain. from the studio
Kyoto, 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.
Kyoto sits in a basin in central Honshū, ringed by mountains on the north, east, and west, with an elevation of about 56 metres at the city center. It was founded in 794 as Heian-kyō and served as the imperial capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, until the seat moved to Tokyo in 1868. The city was deliberately spared from American firebombing in 1945, leaving its temple and machiya townhouse fabric largely intact. UNESCO inscribed seventeen Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto as a single World Heritage site in 1994. Today the city holds about 1.45 million people.
After dark the Higashiyama district holds the city's older sound. The slopes from Yasaka Jinja down through Gion are lit by paper-lantern frontage rather than streetlight, and the wooden ochaya teahouses on Hanamikōji keep their lights low. Yasaka Shrine, founded in 656, stays open through the night and is free to enter. During Gion Matsuri in July, the Yoiyama evenings see the chōchin lanterns of the festival floats lit along Karasuma; for the New Year's hatsumōde, more than a million visitors pass through Yasaka and Fushimi Inari in the first three days.
Kyoto's year is built around four high moments. Cherry blossoms peak in the first week of April along the Philosopher's Path and the Kamogawa River. Gion Matsuri, the city's signature festival, runs all of July, with the grand Yamaboko Junkō float procession on the 17th. Daimonji, the great bonfire ritual on five mountains visible across the city, burns on the night of August 16. Autumn colour peaks in mid- to late November at Tōfuku-ji and Eikan-dō. Winter is quiet, occasionally snowed, and the time most locals say the city reads truest.