Kathmandu
— the smell of butter lamps before dawn.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Nepal, set in a green bowl ringed by mountains. Old brick courtyards, prayer wheels at Boudhanath, the spire of Swayambhunath above the haze. Mornings smell of butter lamps and woodsmoke. The afternoon hush before the monsoon arrives carries the same brass undertone the temples have been keeping for a thousand years.
Kathmandu, 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.
Kathmandu sits at about 1,400 metres in a bowl of fertile valleys ringed by the Mahabharat range, with the Himalaya rising further north. It is the capital of Nepal and the cultural seat of the Kathmandu Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage area shared with Patan and Bhaktapur. The Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers meet inside the city. Around three million people live in the wider valley. International flights land at Tribhuvan, a single-runway airport hemmed in by the surrounding hills. The valley has been continuously inhabited since at least the second century.
The valley's signature architecture is Newar: three-tiered pagoda temples in carved wood and warm brick, clustered around courtyards called bahals. Durbar Square in central Kathmandu, the royal complex first laid out in the 12th century, holds Kasthamandap, the wooden pavilion the city took its name from. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake brought down several of these structures, including Kasthamandap itself; rebuilding is ongoing under the Department of Archaeology, using salvaged timbers and traditional joinery wherever the original beams survived. The replacement Kasthamandap reopened to visitors in 2022.
Kathmandu sits in a closed valley, and the air carries everything that happens in it: woodsmoke from morning kitchens, juniper from the monastery courtyards, diesel from the ring road, dust the dry season raises off the brick. The monsoon arrives in June and washes the city for three months, after which October and November are the clearest. From rooftops above Thamel the Langtang range is visible on those mornings, more than fifty kilometres north, the peaks holding their snow above the haze.