Lomé
— — a coast city that wakes to the surf and the market in the same minute.
Not only on a wall.
“Togo's capital, set on a long flat coast where the Atlantic surf comes in heavy and the Ghana border runs to the western edge of town. Grand Marché traders in printed wax cloth, fishermen pulling pirogues up the sand at Avépozo, the colonial-era cathedral and the wide Boulevard du Mono. The Akodessewa fetish market sits east of the centre, one of the largest of its kind in West Africa. The harmattan haze comes in December. — from the studio
Lomé, 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.
Lomé is the capital and largest city of Togo, set on the Gulf of Guinea where the country meets a narrow 56-kilometre Atlantic coastline. The city sits directly on the border with Ghana to the west, an unusual placement that has shaped its trade since German colonial planners laid it out in the 1890s. Greater Lomé holds roughly 1.7 million people, about a quarter of Togo's population. The Port Autonome de Lomé is the only deepwater port on this stretch of coast and serves landlocked Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali through the trans-Saharan corridor.
The coast runs east–west along an open Atlantic shelf with no headland or bay, so the surf at Lomé arrives unbroken and steady year-round. The climate is tropical wet-and-dry; the long rains come April through July, the short rains in October, and the dry harmattan wind blows fine Saharan dust down from the north from December to February. Average daytime temperatures hold between 27 and 32 °C through the year. The Boulevard de la République, also called the Boulevard du Mono, runs the full length of the seafront and is where the city meets the wind.
Three landmarks anchor a walk through the city. Grand Marché, the central market off Rue du Commerce, is the historic ground of the Nana Benz, the women cloth-traders who controlled the regional wax-print trade through the 1970s and 80s. The Cathédrale du Sacré-Cœur de Lomé, completed in 1902 under the German protectorate, stands a block north. East of the centre, the Akodessewa Marché des Féticheurs is among the largest traditional-medicine markets in West Africa and serves practitioners across the Volta basin. Most visits route through Gnassingbé Eyadéma International Airport, eight kilometres north of the centre.