Khamis Mushait
— — a cool city held at two thousand metres.
Not only on a wall.
“Khamis Mushait sits up on the Asir plateau, paired with neighbouring Abha as the high cool counterweight to the Red Sea coast far below. The air is thinner here than the rest of the kingdom expects. Stone houses with painted Qatt Asiri patterns climb the slopes; juniper holds the ridges. The week the summer monsoon reaches the escarpment, cloud comes up the valley and the city goes quiet.
Khamis Mushait, 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.
Khamis Mushait sits on the Asir plateau in southwestern Saudi Arabia at roughly 2,030 metres above sea level, about twenty kilometres east of Abha along the main escarpment road. The city's name carries its old market day: khamis means Thursday in Arabic, the day on which the regional souq met. It has grown into one of the larger urban centres of the kingdom outside the central spine, and is home to King Khalid Air Base. The wider Asir region is bounded by the Sarawat mountains to the west and the desert interior to the east.
At two thousand metres the climate breaks from the rest of the kingdom. Summer highs sit in the high twenties Celsius rather than the forties of Riyadh or Jeddah, and the Asir plateau catches the northern edge of the southwest monsoon between June and September. Cloud climbs the western escarpment in the afternoons, fog settles in the wadis, and rain falls more reliably here than anywhere else in Saudi Arabia. Junipers, wild olives, and acacias hold the ridges. The combination has made Asir the kingdom's summer retreat for a century.
The Asir region keeps the tradition of Al-Qatt Al-Asiri: the geometric mural painting that women of the region apply to interior walls, around windows, and along door frames in red, green, blue, yellow, and black. UNESCO inscribed the practice on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. The patterns are passed mother to daughter, named for triangle, comb, and palm forms, and they appear on the stone-and-timber houses that climb the slopes around Khamis Mushait and Abha, houses whose flat roofs and projecting wood courses are an Asir signature.