
— — a hand-painted billboard the city forgot to take down.
“The hillside writing visible from a hundred miles of freeway and almost no one's living room. Nine white letters on the south face of Mount Lee, four storeys tall, set into the chaparral above Beachwood Canyon. From the Griffith Observatory parking lot you can see the whole word at once. From below, in the residential streets of the Hollywood Hills, it's a different sign every block. Sometimes the H is gone behind a roofline. Sometimes only the OOD is left. No road goes to it. The letters are closer to the sky than to the city.

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 Hollywood Sign sits on the south slope of Mount Lee, the highest peak in the Hollywood Hills at 1,708 feet (520 m), inside the boundary of Griffith Park in central Los Angeles. The nine letters are 45 feet (13.7 m) tall and span 350 feet (110 m) end to end, made of corrugated steel painted white and anchored to the hillside on a steep, brushy grade. No road approaches the sign itself; the closest legal viewpoints are the Griffith Observatory, Lake Hollywood Park, and the Hollyridge Trail above Beachwood Canyon. The City of Los Angeles owns the structure, and the nonprofit Hollywood Sign Trust maintains it.
The sign was erected in 1923 by the Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler as a temporary billboard reading HOLLYWOODLAND, advertising a real-estate development in the hills above the new film district. It was meant to stand for eighteen months. By 1949, the original wooden letters were rotting; the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce repaired the structure and dropped the final four letters. The current sign was rebuilt in 1978 in corrugated steel after Hugh Hefner hosted a fundraiser, with nine donors sponsoring one letter each at $27,777 apiece. Among them: Hefner, Andy Williams, Alice Cooper, and Gene Autry. Los Angeles named the sign Historic-Cultural Monument No. 111 in 1973.
Three things determine how the sign looks to you: the angle, the air, and how close the road lets you get. The Griffith Observatory delivers the cleanest postcard view from 1.5 miles east, with the letters small but legible against the brown hillside. Lake Hollywood Park, in the canyon directly below, frames the sign through palms and oaks. The Hollyridge Trail, off Beachwood Drive, brings hikers within about half a mile of the back of the sign at the Mount Lee summit. Tour buses to the residential viewpoints require permits. No vehicle can drive to the sign itself; a chain-link fence and motion sensors guard the perimeter.