Santa Ynez Valley
— the gold the hills hold all summer.
Not only on a wall.
“Oak savanna, vineyard rows, and six small towns scattered across a wide California valley between two mountain ranges. Solvang's Danish bakeries on one end, Los Olivos's flag-lined main street in the middle, the long roll of Foxen Canyon Road carrying you north past Pinot Noir blocks that look like corduroy on the hillside. The light here is the slow, dry, evening-gold kind that doesn't quite happen anywhere else in the state. from the studio
Santa Ynez Valley, 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.
The Santa Ynez Valley lies in northern Santa Barbara County, California, cradled between the Santa Ynez Mountains to the south and the San Rafael range to the north. The valley floor runs about 30 miles east to west and is drained by the Santa Ynez River. Its six communities — Solvang, Buellton, Los Olivos, Santa Ynez, Ballard, and Los Alamos — share a population of roughly 22,000. The Santa Ynez Valley AVA, established in 1983, sits inside the larger Santa Barbara County wine country and covers about 76,000 acres of transverse-range hillsides that channel cool Pacific air inland.
The valley's transverse east-west orientation is uncommon in California; most coastal ranges run north-south. The geometry pulls afternoon fog deep inland through the Sta. Rita Hills sub-AVA on the western end, then releases it by late morning further east at Happy Canyon, where summer afternoons can reach 95°F. The contrast is what cools the wine country and what tilts the hill grasses gold by mid-June. From the bluffs above Foxen Canyon Road the light at 6 p.m. in August is the color of an old oak floor.
Three small towns anchor most visits. Solvang, founded by Danish-American educators in 1911, holds the bakeries and half-timbered storefronts. Los Olivos has a four-block main street of tasting rooms gathered around a single flagpole. Santa Ynez keeps the working-ranch character that the others have softened. Highway 154 over San Marcos Pass connects the valley to Santa Barbara in about 45 minutes. The 2004 film Sideways was shot here, and Hitching Post II in Buellton still serves the same Pinot Noir it did then.