Aberdeen
— — a grey that catches the light and holds it.
Not only on a wall.
“The Granite City, set between the mouths of the Dee and the Don on Scotland's northeast coast. Almost the whole old town is cut from local pale grey granite, which holds the North Sea light in a way no other British city does. A working harbour at one end, a long pale beach at the other, and the cobbles of Old Aberdeen with its medieval cathedral and university in between. — from the studio
Aberdeen, 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.
Aberdeen is Scotland's third-largest city, with a population of about 200,000, set on the North Sea coast between the mouths of the rivers Dee and Don. It lies about 130 miles northeast of Edinburgh and 105 miles north of Dundee. Old Aberdeen, around the medieval cathedral of St Machar and the founding buildings of the University of Aberdeen (1495), sits in the north of the city; the newer eighteenth- and nineteenth-century granite core stretches south along Union Street to the harbour at the Dee's mouth. The city is the centre of the United Kingdom's North Sea oil industry.
Aberdeen is called the Granite City because so much of it is cut from a single rock — the pale grey, mica-flecked granite of the Rubislaw Quarry on the western edge of town. The quarry ran from 1740 to 1971 and produced an estimated six million tonnes of stone, used not only across the city but for the Houses of Parliament terraces in London and the Forth Rail Bridge piers. Marischal College, finished in 1906, is the second-largest granite building in the world after the Escorial. In sunlight, the stone reads silver; in rain, it reads ink.
The Dee comes down out of the Cairngorms — Britain's highest plateau — and meets the North Sea at Aberdeen's harbour after 87 miles. It is one of the country's great salmon rivers, and the Royal Family's Balmoral estate sits on its upper reach. The Don, slightly shorter at 82 miles, enters the sea a couple of miles north of the harbour. Between the two river mouths runs the long pale crescent of Aberdeen Beach, a working stretch of North Sea sand that holds the city's runners, dog-walkers, and winter surfers year-round.