Geneva
— — a quiet city the world keeps coming to.
Not only on a wall.
“Geneva sits where the Rhône leaves Lake Geneva, in the French-speaking corner of Switzerland. The Jet d'Eau throws a column of lake water 140 metres into the air. The old town rises behind the south shore, the Palais des Nations stands on the north, and Mont Blanc shows on the clearest mornings. A city that does its diplomacy in low voices and serves its coffee strong. — from the studio
Geneva, 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.
Geneva sits at the southwestern tip of Lake Geneva, where the Rhône River leaves the lake on its way to the Mediterranean. The canton borders France on three sides; the city itself counts about 200,000 residents, with roughly 600,000 in the metropolitan area that spills across the French border. The European headquarters of the United Nations occupies the Palais des Nations, built between 1929 and 1938 for the League of Nations. The International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in Geneva in 1863, still maintains its headquarters here. Mont Blanc rises 70 kilometres to the southeast.
Lake Geneva is the largest lake in western Europe by volume, holding roughly 89 cubic kilometres of water across 580 square kilometres of surface. The Rhône enters the lake near Villeneuve and leaves it through the city of Geneva. The Jet d'Eau, the city's signature fountain, pumps about 500 litres per second to a height of 140 metres; it was installed in 1886 as a pressure-relief valve for a hydraulic plant and became permanent in 1891. The lake reads turquoise in summer light and slate-grey when the bise wind blows down from the north.
The Old Town climbs a sandstone bluff above the south shore. The Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, begun in 1160, was stripped of its Catholic interior during the Reformation; John Calvin preached from its pulpit between 1536 and 1564. The Reformation Wall along Parc des Bastions, completed in 1909, carves four of the movement's principal figures into a hundred-metre stretch of stone. Maison Tavel, the oldest surviving private dwelling in the city, dates to the twelfth century. Much of the old town's pale yellow render and grey-stone trim is original to the eighteenth-century reconstructions.