Coachella Valley
— — a desert that turned itself into a garden.
Not only on a wall.
“South of Joshua Tree, west of the Salton Sea, walled in by the San Jacintos on one side and the Little San Bernardinos on the other. Palm Springs sits at the head of it. The valley has been a winter address for Hollywood, a date-palm orchard, a golf town, and a music festival's borrowed name. The light is the constant, clean and dry and very level.
Coachella 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 Coachella Valley runs about 45 miles southeast from the San Gorgonio Pass to the northern shore of the Salton Sea, in Riverside County, California. It is bounded by the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains to the west and the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the east. Nine cities sit on the valley floor: Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Indio, Coachella, and Desert Hot Springs. Highway 111 and Interstate 10 carry traffic east from greater Los Angeles, about two hours away.
The valley floor sits below 500 feet of elevation and runs hot. Summer afternoons routinely cross 110°F; winter nights drop into the forties. Average annual rainfall is under four inches. The dryness is what brought the snowbirds and the mid-century architects: clear skies most of the year, low humidity, and the long evening light that made Palm Springs an Old Hollywood weekend address from the 1930s onward. Wind funnels through the San Gorgonio Pass and turns the wind farm visible from I-10 just west of the city.
The valley's calendar runs on the cool half of the year. The BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament fills Indian Wells in March. The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach take over the Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio across three April weekends. Modernism Week in Palm Springs draws architecture pilgrims each February. By late May the valley empties out; by October it fills again. The date harvest runs through the fall, with the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival held each February in Indio.