Aurora
— the prairie city the Front Range gave a skyline.
Not only on a wall.
“A sprawling high-plains city on Denver's eastern edge, where shortgrass prairie meets a long wall of Front Range peaks. The Anschutz Medical Campus rises from what was once Fitzsimons Army Hospital, and Buckley's antenna fields catch the light at dawn. Cherry Creek Reservoir sits at the south edge, the water flat and cold under a wide Colorado sky.
Aurora, 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.
Aurora occupies the eastern edge of the Denver metropolitan area, spanning Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas counties on the Colorado high plains at roughly 5,471 feet of elevation. The 2020 U.S. Census recorded 386,261 residents, making it the third-largest city in the state after Denver and Colorado Springs. Incorporated in 1903 as the town of Fletcher and renamed Aurora in 1907, the city grew through the twentieth century around Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Lowry and Buckley airfields, and the postwar suburban push east from Denver.
The Anschutz Medical Campus, on the footprint of the closed Fitzsimons Army Hospital, is the largest academic health centre between Chicago and the West Coast. It anchors the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Children's Hospital Colorado and a Department of Veterans Affairs medical centre. A few miles east, Buckley Space Force Base hosts missile-warning satellite operations for U.S. Space Command. The Stanley Marketplace, a former Stanley Aviation factory now full of independent shops and restaurants, sits between them on East 25th Avenue.
The Colorado Front Range sits roughly fifteen to forty miles west, depending on which Aurora neighbourhood you stand in, and the prairie east of the city falls away unbroken almost to the Kansas line. That geometry gives Aurora a particular weather signature: clear morning light, afternoon thunderheads building over the foothills in summer, and the dry winter chinooks that have spared the city most of Denver's heaviest snow. Cherry Creek Reservoir, at the southern edge, holds about 880 surface acres of cold open water.