Girona Old Town colored riverfront
— a row of houses that gave the river its colour.
Not only on a wall.
Girona Old Town colored riverfront, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The painted houses along the Onyar, hung over the water on the old-town side. They are called the Cases de l'Onyar, and their ochre, rust and rose facades were a coordinated repainting through the late twentieth century, advised by Catalan painters including Enric Ansesa. From the Pont de Pedra, the cathedral lifts behind the rooflines. The river is shallow most of the year. The reflections do most of the work.
The place, in three passes.
Girona sits on the Onyar river in northeastern Catalonia, about 100 kilometres north of Barcelona and 60 kilometres south of the French border. The old town rises on the eastern bank, with the cathedral and the medieval Jewish quarter, El Call, on the high ground above the river. The painted houses are the Cases de l'Onyar, the row of dwellings whose facades drop straight into the water on the old-town side. Girona's population is around 104,000.
The colour scheme on the Cases de l'Onyar is a planned palette, not an accident. Through the 1980s the city worked with Catalan painters, including Enric Ansesa and Jaume Faixó, on a coordinated repainting that fixed the ochres, rusts, roses and pale yellows still in use. The brief was to read as a single composition across the row, so no two adjacent facades repeat exactly. The reflection in the slow Onyar doubles the palette and gives the postcard its weight.
Girona is on the Barcelona-Figueres-Perpignan high-speed line; the AVE station sits a short walk west of the river and reaches central Barcelona in 38 minutes. The painted-house view is taken most often from the Pont de Pedra and the Pont de Sant Agustí. The Eiffel-designed Pont de les Peixateries Velles spans the river a little upstream and adds a red iron lattice to the foreground. The cathedral and the Jewish quarter close the view above the rooflines.
