Kashan
— — a city the desert taught how to keep cool.
Not only on a wall.
“Kashan sits where the central plateau meets the great salt desert. Its old courtyards run deep below street level, walls a metre thick of mud-brick and straw, badgir towers pulling cool air down through summer rooms. The Fin Garden has held water under its plane trees since the Safavid century. Down in Qamsar the rose harvest still distils in copper alembics each May.
Kashan, 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.
Kashan is a city of roughly 400,000 in northern Isfahan Province, on the western edge of the Dasht-e Kavir at an elevation around 982 metres. It sits about 240 kilometres south of Tehran on the road to Isfahan. The Sialk mound on the southwestern outskirts is one of the oldest known continuously occupied sites in Iran, with strata dating to the late seventh millennium BCE. The modern city grew around the Safavid bazaar, the eighteenth-century Agha Bozorg Mosque and madrasa, and the merchant quarters of the Qajar period.
The merchant houses of Kashan, including Tabatabaei (1834), Borujerdi (1857), Abbasian (late eighteenth century), and Ameri, are the finest surviving examples of Qajar-era Persian domestic architecture. Each centres on a sunken courtyard four to six metres below grade, with thick mud-brick walls, stained-glass orosi windows, and badgir wind-catchers that draw cool air through summer halls. The Fin Garden three kilometres south of the city was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as part of the serial Persian Garden World Heritage nomination. Its central qanat-fed pools have run continuously since the sixteenth century.
Kashan's year turns on the rose harvest in the mountain village of Qamsar, about 30 kilometres south. Each May the damask roses bloom, and households distil rosewater (golab) in traditional copper alembics over wood fires. The Golab-giri festival draws visitors from across Iran for roughly three weeks. The city itself is most comfortable March through May and again September through November; summer temperatures in the basin regularly exceed 40°C, which is exactly why the old houses sit so deep below the street level.