Stockholm
— — the city the water threads together.
Not only on a wall.
“Spread across fourteen islands at the place where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic. The old town, Gamla Stan, has held the same medieval street plan since the thirteenth century, the colours running from ochre to deep red against dark water. In summer the sun barely sets; in winter the harbour ices, the ferries keep moving, and the light goes blue at three in the afternoon. from the studio
Stockholm, 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.
Stockholm sits at the eastern outlet of Lake Mälaren on the central coast of Sweden, where the lake's fresh water meets the brackish Baltic Sea. The city proper covers fourteen islands connected by 57 bridges, with a metropolitan population near 2.5 million. The historic core, Gamla Stan, occupies the island of Stadsholmen and retains its medieval street pattern from the founding of the city around 1252 by the regent Birger Jarl. The Royal Palace, completed in 1754 in Italian Baroque, holds 1,430 rooms and remains the official residence of the Swedish monarch.
At latitude 59.3 degrees north, Stockholm sits closer to the Arctic Circle than to the equator, which gives the city an extreme annual swing in daylight. On the summer solstice the sun rises at 3:30 a.m. and sets at 10:10 p.m., with a long blue twilight in between. At the winter solstice daylight runs from 8:45 a.m. to 2:50 p.m., with the harbour often holding the slate-blue light photographers know as the Scandinavian afternoon. The same low sun keeps the painted façades of Gamla Stan glowing for hours each side of noon.
The Stockholm archipelago extends roughly 60 kilometres east from the city and contains nearly 30,000 islands, islets, and skerries, the largest archipelago in Sweden. Lake Mälaren, the country's third-largest lake, drains into the Baltic in central Stockholm through the locks at Slussen, which were first cut in the seventeenth century to control the water level. The Vasa, a seventeenth-century warship raised from the harbour in 1961 after 333 years on the seabed, is preserved in its own museum on Djurgården and remains the most visited museum in Scandinavia.