Horsley Hills
— — a quieter cool above the Deccan plain.
Not only on a wall.
“A small hill station in the Eastern Ghats of southern Andhra Pradesh, 1,265 metres up, named in the 1870s for W.D. Horsley, a British collector who built a summer house there. Eucalyptus and jacaranda line the road from Madanapalle. The temperature drops by ten degrees once the road climbs the last ridge. The plain reads as haze in every direction, and the wind sounds like the trees, not the road.
Horsley Hills, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Horsley Hills is a small hill station in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, set on a plateau of the Eastern Ghats at about 1,265 metres above sea level. The nearest town is Madanapalle, twenty-eight kilometres east; Bangalore lies roughly 144 kilometres south-west. The locality is also known in Telugu as Yenugu Mallamma Konda, after a folk legend predating the British period. It was given its English name in the 1870s for W.D. Horsley, the district collector of Cuddapah, who built a summer residence on the ridge.
The elevation drops the air temperature roughly ten degrees Celsius below the surrounding Deccan plain, which is why the British built hot-weather quarters here in the first place. Eucalyptus, jacaranda, and silver oak planted in the colonial period now form most of the canopy, so the air carries that resinous smell more than any indigenous note. A century-and-a-half-old mango tree known as the Kalyani Mango still stands near the centre of the village, sheltered by the same plateau wind that keeps the hills cool through April and May.
The cool months from October through February draw weekenders from Bangalore and Tirupati; March through May, when the Deccan turns furnace, is the traditional reason the station exists. The monsoon arrives in June and stays into September, lifting the haze and saturating the eucalyptus into deeper green. Jacaranda flowers along the access road in late spring, which is the photographer's window. Mornings on the ridge are reliably clear; by mid-afternoon the haze can return, and the view of the plain softens into pale gold.