Tuileries Tray Spring No. 1

The garden plans of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries are among the most beautiful documents in the history of French design: large-format drawings in ink and wash that show the parterre, the bosquet, the canal, and the allée from above, each element precise and considered, the whole composition revealing at a glance the organizing intelligence that would take years to walk through on the ground. The Tuileries Tray Spring No. 1 carries one such plan as its printed surface — the geometry of the French formal garden brought into the domestic interior as a working object.

The Tuileries Garden has been a public space since 1667, when Le Nôtre redesigned it for Louis XIV and opened its formal alleys to the citizens of Paris. It is the garden against which all French formal gardens are measured: the long central axis, the rond-point where the paths converge, the symmetrical parterres that frame the view toward the Seine. The plan illustrated on this tray is a spring composition — the garden at the moment when the formal geometry is at its most readable, before the summer planting fills the beds and softens the lines.

Available in four sizes. The large format carries the full garden plan with its proportions intact; the desk tidy brings a single parterre to a writing surface.