Lausanne
— — a cathedral, and the watchman still calling the hour.
Not only on a wall.
“A terraced city on the north shore of Lac Léman, climbing in switchbacks from the harbour at Ouchy to the Gothic Cathedral on the ridge. The water below holds the Savoy Alps in clear weather and a soft grey nothing in cloud. After ten in the evening the cathedral's night-watchman still calls the hour from the bell tower, a tradition kept since 1405.
Lausanne, 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.
Lausanne sits on the north shore of Lac Léman in the canton of Vaud, climbing roughly 400 metres from the harbour at Ouchy to the upper neighbourhoods above the old town. About 140,000 residents live within roughly 41 square kilometres, making it Switzerland's fourth-largest city. Lausanne has been headquarters of the International Olympic Committee since 1915, when Pierre de Coubertin moved the IOC from Paris, and holds the formal title Olympic Capital since 1994. The Métro M2 line, opened in 2008, climbs the city centre at gradients of up to twelve per cent, the steepest fully automatic metro in the world.
Lausanne Cathedral (Notre-Dame) sits at the highest point of the old town, consecrated in 1275 in the presence of Pope Gregory X and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I. The building is a leading example of early Gothic architecture in Switzerland, with a thirteenth-century rose window on the south transept and a thirteen-bell carillon in the south tower. Since at least 1405 a night-watchman has called the hour from that tower between ten in the evening and two in the morning, in four cardinal directions, a tradition that has survived continuously to the present.
Lac Léman, the largest lake in Western Europe by volume, holds Lausanne against its north shore for roughly twelve kilometres of waterfront. The lake reaches 310 metres at its deepest point off Évian and stays cold enough that the belle-époque steamboats of the Compagnie Générale de Navigation, in service since 1873, still cross to Évian and Geneva on a daily schedule. Ouchy, the harbour district at lake level, holds the Olympic Museum and the long lakefront promenade that runs east into the Lavaux vineyard terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2007.