Haarlem
— — the bell that taught the rest of the country to ring.
Not only on a wall.
“Twenty minutes by train west of Amsterdam, on the river Spaarne. The Grote Markt holds the city in one square: the long Gothic shadow of the Sint-Bavokerk on one side, the gabled Stadhuis on the other, market days twice a week. Mozart played the church's Müller organ at the age of ten. The bulb fields begin a short ride out toward Lisse.
Haarlem, 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.
Haarlem is the capital of the province of North Holland, about 20 kilometres west of Amsterdam on the river Spaarne. The city received its formal rights in 1245 from Count William II and grew rich on linen bleaching, beer, and, later, the seventeenth-century bulb trade with the polders to its south. Population today sits near 165,000. The historic centre is small and walkable, ringed by the line of the old defensive moat. To the west, a short tram ride reaches the dune coast at Zandvoort; to the south, the long flat horticulture belt around Lisse and the Keukenhof.
The Sint-Bavokerk, called locally the Grote Kerk, fills the north side of the Grote Markt. The Gothic cruciform church was built largely between 1370 and 1520, with a wooden central lantern tower rising about 78 metres above the square. Inside hangs the Müller organ, finished in 1738, with around 5,000 pipes; the ten-year-old Mozart played it in 1766, Handel two decades earlier. The floor is paved with grave slabs, among them the painter Frans Hals, buried here in 1666. The Stadhuis opposite holds twelfth-century foundations of an older count's hall.
The Frans Hals Museum keeps the largest collection of the painter's work in the world, in a former hofje at Groot Heiligland 62, open Tuesday through Sunday. The Teylers Museum on the Spaarne, founded in 1778, is the oldest museum in the Netherlands and still arranged in its original neoclassical halls. Market days fill the Grote Markt on Mondays and Saturdays. Trains run to Amsterdam Centraal every ten minutes from Haarlem station, an art-nouveau building of 1908 that is itself worth the platform.