Cliff House Manitou Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— — still lit after a hundred and fifty winters.
Not only on a wall.
“A four-and-a-half-story Victorian holding a corner of Cañon Avenue since 1873, two years before Colorado was a state. The depot for the cog railway is a short walk south, the mineral springs older than the hotel by uncountable centuries. The porches face the canyon; the canyon has flooded it once, fire has taken the top floor once, and the building has come back both times. Roosevelt slept here. Edison too. The peak is always behind it.
Cliff House Manitou Front Range Ceramic Art Tile, 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.
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 place, in three passes.
The Cliff House sits at 306 Cañon Avenue in Manitou Springs, a town of about 5,000 at the eastern foot of Pikes Peak in Colorado's Front Range. Manitou is six miles west of Colorado Springs, at an elevation of 6,320 feet. The hotel was built in the winter of 1873 as a twenty-room boarding house called The Inn, a stagecoach stop on the Colorado Springs to Leadville run. The depot of the Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway is a short walk south, climbing 8.9 miles and 7,795 feet to the summit at 14,115 feet. The Cliff House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
What stands today is a four-and-a-half-story Queen Anne, expanded from the original twenty rooms to roughly two hundred by Edward E. Nichols, who bought the property in 1886 and turned it from a faltering boarding house into a society resort. The verandahs, the dormers, and the gabled roofline are recognisably the Rocky Mountain Victorian vocabulary of the 1880s and 1890s. A March 1982 fire took the fourth floor and the roof. The building stood empty for sixteen years. A ten-and-a-half-million-dollar restoration began in 1997, and a further East Addition followed in 2007 under the Gal-Tex Hotel Corporation. The hotel remains a member of Historic Hotels of America, the National Trust for Historic Preservation's affiliate program.
The Cliff House is still a working hotel. Reservations run through the property at 306 Cañon Avenue; the Manitou Bath House Company that Edward E. Nichols co-founded in 1914 with Governor Oliver Henry Shoup made the town's mineral springs into a destination, and that economy still carries it. The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway runs from late spring through autumn, and the summit is also reachable by car via the Pikes Peak Highway, weather permitting. Manitou's downtown, a stretch of independent storefronts on the canyon road, runs east from the hotel. The guest book has held Theodore Roosevelt, Crown Prince Ferdinand of Austria, Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, and Clark Gable. Most arrive on a quieter Tuesday.