Riyadh
— — the colour of mudbrick before the lamps come on.
Not only on a wall.
“A city that grew out of a walled oasis on the Najd plateau. The Masmak still stands in the old city, its palm-trunk doors darkened with age, while the glass crown of the Kingdom Centre answers it from a few kilometres north. In the late afternoon the light turns everything the colour of date sugar.
Riyadh, 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.
Riyadh sits on the Najd plateau in central Arabia, near 600 metres above sea level, where the gravel desert meets the Wadi Hanifah escarpment. The historic core grew around date orchards and a defensive wall; the modern capital expanded outward after King Abdulaziz reunified the kingdom in 1932. Today it holds roughly seven and a half million people across more than 1,900 square kilometres, the administrative centre of Saudi Arabia and one of the fastest-growing capitals in the world.
The older architecture of Riyadh is Najdi: mudbrick walls finished with palm-frond beams and triangular crenellations carved into the parapets. The Masmak Fortress in the old city was built around 1865 by Abdul Rahman ibn Sulaiman ibn Dabaan and survives almost intact. A short drive northwest, the ruins of At-Turaif in ad-Diriyah, the first Saudi capital, were listed by UNESCO in 2010 for the same earthen vocabulary, still legible against the palms of Wadi Hanifah.
The air over the plateau is dry almost all year. Summer afternoons routinely pass 45 degrees Celsius, the horizon hazed by fine khaki dust the locals call ghubar, and the city quietly moves indoors until evening. Winter brings cool nights and the occasional flash flood through Wadi Hanifah. The clearest hour falls about thirty minutes before sunset, when the dust softens the light against the limestone escarpment west of the city and the muezzin call rolls across the rooftops.