Jeddah
— — coral houses and wooden lattice on the sea wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Jeddah sits on the eastern shore of the Red Sea, the historic port that pilgrims have used to reach Mecca for more than a thousand years. The old quarter, Al-Balad, still holds tall houses built from coral stone cut out of the reef, their upper storeys wrapped in tea-coloured rawasheen — carved wooden lattice screens that catch the sea breeze and break the sun. UNESCO inscribed the district in 2014. The light here is white at noon and goes amber an hour before the call to evening prayer. — from the studio
Jeddah, 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.
Jeddah is the principal port of Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea coast, and for centuries the maritime gateway used by pilgrims travelling to Mecca, roughly 80 kilometres inland. The city's founding is usually placed in the 7th century, when the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, designated it the pilgrim port in 647 CE. Today greater Jeddah holds about 4.7 million people, making it the second-largest city in the kingdom after Riyadh. The historic district of Al-Balad — also called Old Jeddah — was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014.
The old houses of Al-Balad were built from manqabi — coral limestone cut from the offshore reefs and bonded with mortar of lime and reef sand. Some of the tower-houses rise five and six storeys, an unusual height for pre-modern Arabia, supported by the porous lightness of the stone. The signature wooden lattice screens, rawasheen, were carved from teak shipped up from the Indian Ocean trade and assembled into projecting bay windows on the upper floors. The Naseef House, completed in 1881 for the Naseef merchant family, has 106 rooms and is among the most photographed buildings in the quarter.
The climate is hot-desert tempered by the sea. Summer afternoons run past 40°C, and the humidity off the Red Sea keeps the nights warm; winter daytime temperatures sit comfortably in the low to mid 20s°C. Rain is rare — annual totals are about 50 millimetres — and arrives in short, hard November and December showers. The rawasheen screens were engineered for this exact air, drawing the onshore breeze through carved teak while shading the rooms. The King Fahd Fountain on the corniche jets seawater roughly 260 metres into the air, the tallest of its kind.