Chandler
— a desert town the chip foundries quietly rebuilt.
Not only on a wall.
“A grid of broad streets in the southeast Phoenix valley, where citrus groves became circuit-board campuses. The San Marcos Hotel still stands on Commonwealth Avenue, the same coral stucco it wore in 1913. Intel's Ocotillo fab sits a few miles west, low and white against the Estrellas. The light here is dry, level, late-winter blue.
Chandler, 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.
Chandler sits in the East Valley of metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona, about 22 miles southeast of downtown Phoenix and bordered on the south by the Gila River Indian Community. Founded in 1912 by veterinary surgeon Dr. Alexander John Chandler on land he had homesteaded a decade earlier, the town grew around the San Marcos Hotel, completed in 1913 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census placed the population at 275,987, making it the fourth-largest city in Arizona.
Sonoran desert light is what the artwork is chasing here. Chandler sits at roughly 1,213 feet of elevation, far enough from the Phoenix urban core that winter mornings come in clean, with the McDowell and Estrella ranges marking the horizon to the north and west. Afternoon shadows stretch long across San Marcos Park and the historic downtown plaza by four o'clock from November through February. Spring training crowds at nearby Sloan Park in Mesa fill those same blue hours.
The Chandler Ostrich Festival has run since 1989, recalling the brief 1910s ranching boom when Dr. Chandler and others raised ostriches for plume feathers before the fashion collapsed. Held each March at Tumbleweed Park, it draws around 100,000 visitors over a long weekend. The other Chandler rhythm is industrial: Intel's Ocotillo campus, on the west side of town, is the company's largest U.S. manufacturing site and the anchor of the East Valley semiconductor corridor that includes TSMC's Phoenix fab to the northwest.