Carmel-by-the-Sea Cottages
— houses smaller than the stories about them.
Not only on a wall.
“A small village on the Monterey Peninsula, an hour south of Santa Cruz. About twenty of Hugh Comstock's storybook cottages still stand in the village he started building for his wife in 1924. Hansel, Gretel, the Tuck Box, all under 500 square feet, with rolled-shingle roofs that ripple like fabric and chimneys that lean. Residents collect their mail at the post office; the village has never had street addresses. The streets keep their oaks. Tourists come for the beach and the mission. The cottages reward walking.
Carmel-by-the-Sea Cottages, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Carmel-by-the-Sea is a one-square-mile village on the Monterey Peninsula in central California, about 120 miles south of San Francisco. The settlement began in 1902 as a planned artists' colony promoted by developer James Frank Devendorf, who offered favourable terms to writers and painters. The village was incorporated in 1916. It sits between the white sand of Carmel Beach and Highway 1, with the Carmel River reaching the Pacific just to the south. Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Río Carmelo, founded in 1771 by Junípero Serra and now a basilica, anchors the south end of the village. Residents still collect their mail at the post office; addresses are described by cross-streets and block side.
The fairy-tale cottages were the work of Hugh Comstock, a self-taught builder who arrived in Carmel in 1924 to marry Mayotta Browne, a doll-maker. Browne needed display houses for her Otsy-Totsy dolls, so Comstock built her two: Hansel in 1924 and Gretel in 1925. The roofs swelled like risen dough, the chimneys leaned, and the houses held not a single right angle. Buyers wanted their own. Comstock went on to build about twenty more storybook houses in the village before turning to adobe in the 1930s. Most are under 500 square feet. The Tuck Box on Dolores Street, still a tearoom, is the most photographed. No two are alike.
Carmel sits about a ninety-minute drive south of San Jose on US-101 and Highway 1, or roughly two hours from San Francisco. The cottages are private homes, viewed from the sidewalk. The Carmel Heritage Society sells a self-guided walking map of the Comstock houses at the First Murphy House on Lincoln and Sixth. The village keeps no streetlights, no parking meters, and no chain restaurants; an old ordinance even requires permits for shoes with heels over two inches, though no one has ever been cited. Carmel Beach at the foot of Ocean Avenue is free and open daily. The Tuck Box on Dolores serves morning scones. Parking is hardest on summer weekends; mornings and weekday afternoons are quieter.