Beirut
— — a city that keeps rebuilding into its own light.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on a small Mediterranean headland where the mountains come down to the water in under an hour's drive. The light off the sea in late afternoon is the color the postcards always promised, and the limestone arches of Pigeon Rocks sit just off the Raouché corniche where families walk at dusk. The skyline carries the long memory of fifteen years of civil war and the 2020 port blast, and the city goes on rebuilding into that same Mediterranean light.
Beirut, 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.
Beirut is the capital of Lebanon, set on a small headland on the eastern Mediterranean coast about 85 kilometers south of Tripoli and 85 north of Tyre. The Mount Lebanon range rises directly inland, so it is possible to swim in the sea and ski at Mzaar Kfardebian on the same winter day, an hour apart by road. Greater Beirut holds around 2.4 million people, nearly half the country's population. The city has been continuously inhabited for more than 5,000 years, with Canaanite, Phoenician, Roman, Crusader, Ottoman, and French Mandate layers visible in its downtown stones.
The corniche, a seafront promenade roughly five kilometers long, is where the city walks at dusk, and the limestone formations of the Raouché Rocks offshore are most photographed in the last hour of sun, when the sea turns a soft mineral blue against the warm stone. Summer light here is long and bright; winter light is shorter but clearer, and on a clean day the snow line on Mount Sannine, only 40 kilometers inland, sits visibly above the city skyline behind the towers.
The downtown, rebuilt by Solidere through the 1990s after the 1975 to 1990 civil war and again after the August 4, 2020 port explosion, is largely Ottoman sandstone and French Mandate-era stonework. The Roman baths near Riad al-Solh and the columns of the Grand Serail courtyard sit a block from glass towers. Mar Mikhael and Gemmayzeh, the neighborhoods worst hit by the 2020 blast, are still in active restoration, traditional triple-arch houses in Beirut-yellow stone going slowly back together.