Ceramic House Number: Hand-Painted and Kiln-Fired from 59 €

A ceramic house number does one job beautifully: it makes your front door easy to find. Ours are hand-painted and kiln-fired in our studio near Paris, so the colour is glaze fired with the drawing rather than ink printed on the surface. A single-tile number starts at 59 €, we always send you a free mock-up before you order anything, and we post it to you wherever you happen to live.

Hand-painted, kiln-fired: how a ceramic number is made

Slate, plastic and vinyl are all made in a different way. Slate is engraved and the hollow of the numeral is filled with paint. Moulded plastic is coloured in the mass and printed vinyl is ink on a film, cut to shape. Enamelled ceramic belongs to another family altogether: the numeral is painted in glaze on a clay tile, then fired in a kiln at high temperature, so the colour and the surface become a single material rather than a layer sitting on top of one.

That is also why no two tiles are quite alike. Every one is painted by hand rather than stamped out by a machine, so yours is a genuine one-of-a-kind. Small brush marks, an even, hand-painted border, a colour mixed for your door: those are the things that make a ceramic number feel like part of the house rather than a hardware-shop afterthought. To keep it clean, a damp cloth is all it asks.

Legible from the street: the details that actually matter

The most important quality of a house number is that a delivery driver, a taxi or an ambulance can read it in a single glance. We design for that first, and everything else follows.

Contrast does most of the work. A dark figure on a pale ground, or a pale figure on a deep colour, reads far better from a distance than a subtle tone-on-tone effect that looks elegant up close and disappears at ten metres. Size matters too, and it depends on where the number lives. A tile fixed to a gate right by the pavement can be smaller than one on a house set well back behind a front garden. We keep the numerals clean and generous, with enough weight in the stroke to read clearly from across the road.

If your house sits at the end of a long drive, up a shared path, or behind a hedge, just tell us. We will scale the figures up so nobody has to slow the car and squint to check they are in the right place. Our single-tile ceramic house number is the classic starting point, and we can go larger, add a second tile, or set the digits on a longer plaque when the spot calls for it.

Coordinated with your letterbox, door and name sign

A number rarely lives alone by the door, so we design it to sit happily next to everything around it. If you have a letterbox, we can paint a matching letterbox plaque in the same palette and lettering, so the number, the box and the door furniture read as one considered set rather than three separate purchases made on three different days.

Plenty of people pair the number with a name for the house as well: the name above the door, the number by the gate, both drawn in the same hand. Our house name sign is made to match a number exactly, right down to the glaze colour and the shape of the numerals. Tell us the colour of your door, the finish of your ironmongery, even the tone of your brick or render, and we will choose glaze colours that belong together. That small coherence is the thing that makes an entrance look properly finished instead of assembled piece by piece.

Period cottage or new build: one material, many styles

Ceramic suits an old house and a new one equally, because the material is neutral and the style lives entirely in the painting. Nothing about a fired tile ties it to one era.

For a period property, a stone cottage, a Georgian townhouse, an old farmhouse or a Haussmann building, we tend towards classic serif numerals, a hand-painted border and the soft, slightly irregular character that only a brush can give. For a modern home we strip it right back: a clean sans-serif figure, a plain ground and a restrained palette that echoes the architecture rather than fighting it. Because Laurence paints each tile by hand, we are never limited to a fixed catalogue of fonts or a handful of stock designs.

Send us a photo of your façade and we will propose a style that looks like it was always meant to be there, whether that is a blue-and-white azulejo mood for a country house or something quiet and contemporary for a new build. The number should feel like it grew out of the wall, not like it was ordered from a menu.

What it costs and how it reaches you

A single-tile ceramic house number costs 59 €. A hand-painted house name sign is 139 €, and a welcome plaque is 90 €, so it is easy to build a small, coordinated set for the entrance without a large outlay. Friezes and larger murals are priced by area, and we quote those on request once we know the dimensions.

Everything is made in our studio near Paris and posted out to you. Within the European Union there is no customs to think about: your parcel simply arrives. For the United Kingdom, Switzerland and further afield, we handle the export paperwork ourselves, so all you have to do is tell us where you are. We will not invent a customs figure or promise you a duty-free delivery we cannot actually guarantee. We would much rather be straight with you and sort the admin on our end. If your home happens to be a Swiss chalet, we also keep a dedicated page in Swiss francs for a chalet name plaque.

Your free mock-up

Before you spend a euro, we make you a free mock-up. You tell us the number, roughly the look you are after and a little about your door, and we come back with a visual of how your tile could look, usually within about fifteen minutes during the day. There is no obligation and no pressure. If the first version is not quite right, we adjust it until it is, and only then do you decide. It is the easiest way to see your ceramic house number on your own doorstep before it even exists.

Ready to picture yours? Ask us for a free mock-up and tell us a little about your entrance, and we will take it from there.