Mission Santa Barbara
— the late light on both towers at once.
Not only on a wall.
“The tenth of California's twenty-one Franciscan missions, and the only one with two bell towers. The sandstone facade, quarried from a canyon behind the church, turns rose in the late afternoon. Founded in 1786, the mission has been in continuous use by the Franciscan order ever since, the longest such tenure in California. Across Laguna Street, an old rose garden. The bells sound across the lawn at the hour. They call it the Queen of the Missions.
Mission Santa Barbara, 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.
Mission Santa Barbara sits on a low rise in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains, just inland from the Pacific and roughly ninety miles northwest of Los Angeles. It is the tenth of twenty-one Franciscan missions founded along the California coast between 1769 and 1823, established on December 4, 1786 by Father Fermín de Lasuén. The current church, the fourth on the site, was dedicated in 1820 and is the only California mission with two bell towers. The grounds include a working friary, a Chumash cemetery, a museum, and the long colonnaded corridor that fronts the courtyard. The address is 2201 Laguna Street, in the city of Santa Barbara.
The facade is local sandstone, quarried from the foothills behind the church. The design follows a 1787 Spanish edition of Vitruvius, the Roman treatise on architecture, that the Franciscans kept on the shelf at the friary, a rare instance of Roman pattern-book classicism translating directly into a New World church. The twin bell towers, completed in 1820, set the church apart from the other twenty California missions. The 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake brought both towers down; the Franciscan order rebuilt them by 1927 using salvaged stone and the original plans. The sandstone reads pale in noon light and rose in the long afternoon.
The mission is open daily as both a museum and an active parish church; self-guided tours pass through the church, the cemetery, the old kitchen, and a small museum of mission-era artefacts. The Franciscan order has held the site continuously since 1786, the longest unbroken religious tenure of any California mission. Mass is held daily; the cemetery holds more than four thousand Chumash and Spanish settlers. Across Laguna Street, the A.C. Postel Memorial Rose Garden, planted in 1955, is part of Mission Historical Park and is free to enter. The light on the facade is best in the hour before sunset, when the pale sandstone goes rose.