City of Cape Town
— — a city the mountain watches over.
Not only on a wall.
“Cape Town sits at the foot of Table Mountain, where the cold Atlantic comes up the western coast and the warmer water rounds the cape from the east. The mountain holds a flat top above the harbour, with cable cars climbing the north face. South of the city the peninsula runs to the Cape of Good Hope; out in the bay, Robben Island stays visible on clear days. Mornings here arrive slowly. The tablecloth cloud rolls down the slope and the city wakes underneath it.
City of Cape Town, 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.
Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa and the seat of the Western Cape province, with a metropolitan population of roughly 4.8 million. The city wraps the northern slopes of Table Mountain and runs out along both shores of the Cape Peninsula, with the cold Benguela Current to the west and the warmer Agulhas system meeting it to the south. The Dutch East India Company founded the settlement in 1652 as a refreshment station on the route to Asia, and four centuries of layered history sit in the harbour, the Bo-Kaap, and the old Company's Garden.
The Mediterranean climate brings wet winters and dry, windy summers. The southeasterly the locals call the Cape Doctor scours the bay in summer, and when it meets warm air at the mountain's edge the cloud that forms above Table Mountain — the tablecloth — spills slowly down the north face. The summit rises to 1,086 metres above the harbour and is reached by a rotating cableway from Tafelberg Road. Below it, the city ages in salt and sun in roughly equal measure.
Most visitors orient themselves at the V&A Waterfront, the working harbour at the foot of the city. From there the ferries cross to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison; the island became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. South of the bowl, Chapman's Peak Drive cuts along the cliffs to Hout Bay and on toward Cape Point. The light is best in the hour after the southeaster drops, when the bay turns flat and the mountain reads in detail.