
— the house that taught Newport to build bigger.

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 first of the Bellevue Avenue summer palaces, set well back behind a deep lawn and a low stone wall. Granite below, decorative woodwork above, the High Victorian eclecticism Richard Morris Hunt brought back from his Paris years pulled across the facade in mansard roof, bracketed eaves, and porches edged in carpenter detail. Built for a China-trade fortune, lived in for almost a century by one family. The trees on the lawn are nearly as old as the house. from the studio
Chateau-sur-Mer sits on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, the earliest of the great Bellevue summer houses. It was completed in 1852 to designs by Seth C. Bradford for William Shepard Wetmore, a merchant who made his fortune in the China trade. Wetmore's son George Peabody Wetmore, later a United States senator from Rhode Island, hired Richard Morris Hunt in the early 1870s for a major remodel that gave the house its current High Victorian character. The Preservation Society of Newport County has owned and operated the property since 1969, and it is a contributing building of the Bellevue Avenue Historic District, a National Historic Landmark.
The house is granite-walled below and richly worked above. Hunt's 1872 remodel added the mansard roof, the bracketed and carved eaves, the central tower, and the carpenter-detailed porches and overhangs that give the facade its layered, eclectic character. The interior carries the same density: a three-story central hall, painted ceilings by Luigi Frullini, and Eastlake-influenced woodwork. The deep lawn out front holds one of the most important private tree collections in nineteenth-century New England, including specimens dating to the 1850s grading by Frederick Law Olmsted's contemporary horticultural circles.
Chateau-sur-Mer is open to the public as a museum house under the Preservation Society of Newport County. It typically opens in late spring and runs through the New Year, with the Society's noted Christmas-at-the-Newport-Mansions decoration program running from late November into early January. Tickets are sold individually or as part of a multi-mansion pass that also covers The Breakers, The Elms, Marble House, and Rosecliff. The site is on Bellevue Avenue a short distance from the cliff-side Newport Cliff Walk and a few minutes from the harbour and downtown.