Ceramic Address Plaque for US Homes, Hand-Painted, 179 €

A ceramic address plaque has one job on an American street: your number has to be readable from a moving car, by someone who has never been to your house. Ours are painted by hand, one tile at a time, by Laurence Brecher at Tout en céramique, her studio in Le Vésinet just west of Paris, France. A single-tile house number is 179 €, shipping and import duties included, so there is nothing left to pay when the box reaches your porch. And before you spend anything, we send you a mock-up of your own plaque, with your number and your colors on it.

Let us be straight about the price

You can buy a hand-painted address tile from a studio in the United States, and you will probably pay less than 179 € for it. That is simply true. We are in France, your parcel crosses an ocean, and the price carries that.

So here is the honest case for ordering from us anyway, and it rests on three things only.

A named person paints it. Nothing is printed here and nothing is engraved. Laurence paints your number in enamel with a brush, one tile at a time, and then fires it in the kiln, so the color is a glaze fired into the tile rather than ink laid on a surface.

You see it before you pay. A mock-up of your own plaque, your number, your lettering, your colors, sent to you for free, with no obligation at the end of it.

The price is the whole price. 179 € for a single-tile number, 269 € for a house name plaque, shipping and import duties already inside the figure.

What we will not do is tell you how the piece will look in ten years on your particular wall, facing whichever way it faces. That is not ours to promise. We would rather explain exactly how the tile is made and let you judge for yourself.

Hand painted house numbers: how the tile is made

House numbers are made in genuinely different ways, and that is the real difference between them.

A printed sign is ink laid on top of a board or a film, added after the board was made. An engraved sign has the figures cut into the material and then filled. Cast metal numbers are poured into a mold and finished. A ceramic house number belongs to none of those families. The tile is faience, the color is enamel applied with a brush, and the firing takes the enamel and the clay up together until the color vitrifies, which is to say it turns into a thin layer of colored glass bonded to the tile. The number ends up in the surface rather than on it. That is a fact about how it is made, not a claim about what happens to it afterwards.

The other consequence of hand work is that no two tiles come out the same. The weight of a stroke, the small irregularity along a hand-painted border, the exact blue: those belong to your tile and to no other. You are not choosing a template from a dropdown menu, which is also why we can follow the color of your front door or a shade from your shutters. A damp cloth is all the cleaning it asks for.

Size, placement and reading it from the street

The standard house number tile is 15 by 15 cm, just under 6 inches square. That size suits most American entrances: big enough to carry across a front yard, small enough to sit beside a door, on a porch column or on a mailbox post at the curb.

Contrast does most of the work. A dark figure on a pale ground, or a pale figure on a deep color, reads from much further away than an elegant tone on tone that looks lovely from three feet and disappears from thirty. Weight matters too: a generous stroke carries, a thin decorative one does not.

Placement changes the drawing. A tile on a mailbox post at the sidewalk sits a few feet from the driver’s window, so the figures can stay modest. A tile beside a front door set well back behind a lawn is read across the whole depth of the yard, and the figures need to grow accordingly. Tell us which of the two your house is, and we draw for that distance rather than for a catalog.

If your number runs long, tell us at the start. We lay it out over more than one tile so the figures stay generous instead of shrinking to fit, and we tell you what that layout costs before anything happens.

A custom address plaque with your house name on it

Not every address plaque is a number. If your house has a name or a family name you want by the door, a house name plaque is 269 € delivered to the United States, shipping and duties included, painted in the same hand as a number tile.

An entrance can carry both: the name by the door, the number out where the driver can see it, drawn in the same lettering and the same colors so the front of the house reads as one piece of work. If that is what you want, say so at the start and we design the pair together.

Prices in euros, and nothing due on arrival

Here are the two numbers, plainly. A single-tile ceramic address plaque with your house number is 179 €, and a house name plaque is 269 €. Both include shipping to the United States and the import duties.

That last part changed recently, and it is worth knowing. Since 29 August 2025 the United States charges import duties on parcels of any value. The old 800 dollar exemption, which used to let small packages in without a bill, no longer exists. In practice a parcel arriving from Europe normally comes with duties to settle before it is handed over, and you find out the amount on your doorstep. We would rather not do that to you. We pay the duties on our end, before the box leaves the studio, and the figure you agreed to is the figure you paid.

Prices are in euros because that is the currency we work in. Your card issuer converts at the rate of the day, and we will not quote you a dollar figure that would be wrong by the time you read it.

How long it takes

Each piece is painted by hand and then fired, so the studio time is real: allow a few weeks from the moment you approve the mock-up. Then allow about a week in transit to the United States.

If the plaque is meant for a date, a housewarming or a gift, tell us the date in your first message, and we will say honestly whether it fits.

See your plaque before you pay for it

This is the part we care about most, and it costs nothing. Send us your number or your house name through our request form, tell us roughly the style you like, and add a photo of your entrance if you have one on your phone. We reply usually within the hour during Paris working hours.

Then we make you a mock-up: your number, the lettering, the colors, laid out as they would actually be painted. If the blue is not your blue, we change it. If the figures want to be bigger, we make them bigger. Nothing touches a tile until you look at the thing and say yes.

If you are reading this from Europe

This page is written for an American address, with the American price and the customs situation built into it. If your house is in Europe, two neighboring pages will serve you better: our guide to the ceramic house number and our guide to the ceramic house sign are the European version, written with European prices, European shipping and European doors in mind.

Wherever you are, the starting point is the same. Tell us the number, tell us a little about the front of your house, and ask us for a free mock-up. We will show you what your address plaque could look like before a single brush touches a tile.