Watts Towers

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 Watts Towers stand at 1727 East 107th Street in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, California, about ten miles south of downtown Los Angeles. The site is served by the Metro A Line at the 103rd Street/Watts Towers station, a half-mile walk north.

The Watts Towers were built by Sabato Rodia, an Italian-immigrant tile-setter and construction worker, who lived on the property and worked on the structures alone. He built without scaffolding, machine equipment, or assistants, using only hand tools and the broken material he gathered from the neighborhood.

The tallest of the seventeen towers reaches 99.5 feet, with several others between fifty and ninety feet. They are built of steel rebar wrapped in chicken wire and cement mortar, with no welds or bolts, and pressed with broken glass, tile, pottery, and shells across their surfaces.

Sabato Rodia worked on the towers from 1921 to 1954, a continuous span of thirty-three years. He built them in his evenings and weekends, then in retirement, and stopped only after giving the property away to a neighbor in 1955 and moving to Martinez, California.

The structural frames are steel rebar wrapped in chicken wire and coated in hand-mixed cement mortar. The decorative surfaces are pressed with broken green Squirt and 7-Up bottles, blue Milk of Magnesia bottles, Bauer pottery, Malibu tile, Pacific Clay, dinner plates, sea shells, and mirror fragments.

Yes. In 1959 the City of Los Angeles declared the towers unsafe and ordered them dismantled. A stress test conducted in October 1959 pulled at the tallest tower with about ten thousand pounds of horizontal force and could not move it; the demolition order was withdrawn shortly after.

Yes. The Watts Towers Arts Center runs guided tours Thursday through Sunday for a small per-person fee, with weekend reservations recommended. The towers are also visible from the surrounding sidewalk at all hours and from the open perimeter during gate hours.

It has been a meaningful gift for customers with roots in Watts and the surrounding neighborhoods, and for collectors of outsider and folk art. The Towers are a touchstone for both communities, and the artwork carries the broken-glass mosaic detail that anyone who has visited the site remembers.

The palette runs through warm cement grey, Bauer pottery green, Milk of Magnesia blue, and the rust red of old terracotta. It sits comfortably with Maximalist, eclectic-modern, and Mediterranean interiors, particularly rooms already using mosaic tilework, brass, or vintage Mexican pottery.

Outsider and folk-art references have stayed in interior reports through the broader return to handmade, vernacular work, with Maximalist and Mediterranean-modern rooms drawing heavily on mosaic and broken-tile motifs. The Watts Towers piece sits at the heritage end of that family rather than the kitsch end.

Above a standard sofa or a long console, the single Large reads at conversational distance, the four-tile Mural fills a wall above a sectional, and the nine-tile Mural takes the full space above a king bed or wide sideboard.

Yes, in the Dura Satin or Matte finish, which is scratch-resistant and rated for vertical wet installations. The Glossy finish is reserved for framed wall pieces and show cases, away from steam and direct splash.

A soft microfibre cloth dampened with water is enough for routine cleaning. The colour is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure and rests beneath a thin protective finish, so it will not lift or fade with gentle wiping.

Yes. Every WenderVista piece is curated and hand-finished by Reid Wender at Wender Studios in Knoxville, Tennessee. The studio does not license, resell, or print other artists' work. Each ceramic tile is made one at a time in-house.