Windhoek
— — a small capital with a hard blue sky.
Not only on a wall.
“Namibia's capital sits at about 1,700 metres in the Khomas Highland, ringed by the Auas, Eros, and Khomas Hochland ranges and held in a long shallow basin. The Christuskirche in pale Bavarian sandstone has anchored the upper city since 1907, and the Tintenpalast below holds the parliament under a row of jacarandas that turn the streets purple for a few weeks in October. The light is high-desert light — clear, dry, and a little merciless in the afternoon — and the city keeps a quietness unusual for an African capital. from the studio
Windhoek, 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.
Windhoek is the capital and largest city of Namibia, with about 430,000 residents in the central Khomas Region. It sits at roughly 1,700 metres elevation in a basin of the Khomas Highland, surrounded by the Auas Mountains to the south, the Eros Mountains to the northeast, and the Khomas Hochland to the west. The city was formally established by the German colonial administration in 1890 around a set of hot springs that gave it the Khoekhoe name ǀAi-ǁgams, and it became the capital of independent Namibia at independence in 1990.
The Christuskirche, consecrated in 1910 (and built between 1907 and 1910), stands on the rise where Independence Avenue meets Robert Mugabe Avenue, in pale Bavarian sandstone with a green copper roof and a rose window over the western door. Architect Gottlieb Redecker drew on neo-Romanesque and Art Nouveau lines. Below it sits the Tintenpalast (Ink Palace), completed in 1913, which now houses the Parliament of Namibia. A double row of jacaranda trees flanks the avenue between them.
The high-desert altitude gives Windhoek a cool, dry climate unusual for its latitude. Annual rainfall averages about 360 millimetres, almost all of it in short, intense summer storms between December and March. Winter nights (June, July) drop close to freezing, while winter days sit clear and bright in the high teens Celsius. The thin dry air at 1,700 metres holds the colour of the Khomas Hochland — pale ochre, dry-grass yellow, and the deep blue of the southern African sky — sharp and unsoftened.