Sleeping Beauty Castle
— — the small castle that opened the second half of the century.
Not only on a wall.
“The first castle Walt Disney built, at the end of Main Street in Anaheim. Smaller than people remember — seventy-seven feet to the highest spire — and made larger by the trick of forced perspective, the upper storeys shrunk as the eye climbs. Opened on the summer afternoon Disneyland opened, and refreshed every generation since. Bavarian blue, gold leaf at the trim, a moat with white swans on it.
Sleeping Beauty Castle, 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.
Sleeping Beauty Castle stands at the centre of Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, at the north end of Main Street, U.S.A. It opened with the park on 17 July 1955 and was the first of the Disney castles. The structure rises 77 feet from the moat to the highest spire, making it the shortest of the six Disney castles worldwide. The shape draws on the silhouette of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, with a smaller footprint and the rooflines pulled in tighter for forced perspective.
The castle is built of plaster and fibreglass over a steel frame, not the local stone its silhouette suggests. The forced-perspective trick was the work of art director Herb Ryman, who drew the original concept over a weekend in September 1953 for Walt Disney's bankers' pitch. The upper storeys are scaled down progressively so the building reads as taller than its 77 feet. Gold leaf was added to the spires in 1996 for the park's 40th anniversary and again refreshed for the 2019 Bavarian-blue repaint led by show designer Kim Irvine.
The castle stands inside Disneyland Park, which requires a dated park ticket purchased through the official Disneyland app or website. The walk-through diorama inside the castle, telling the Sleeping Beauty story in miniature scenes, reopened in 2008 after a long closure and runs daily during normal park hours. The best photographs come from the hub at the end of Main Street between forty and sixty minutes before sunset, when the western light catches the gold trim and the moat reads as still water.