Denver skyline from Sloans Lake Denver Metro Ceramic Art Tile
— — the city doubled at dawn.
Not only on a wall.
“The skyline of Denver seen across a 177-acre lake in the northwest part of the city. The water happened by accident. A well-digger in the 1860s struck an underground spring and the field filled overnight. Now it's where the city looks at itself. Downtown sits three miles east. The Rockies rise the other way. The reflection holds until somebody puts a boat in.
Denver skyline from Sloans Lake Denver Metro 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.
Sloan's Lake sits in northwest Denver, about three miles west of the city's downtown core. At 177 acres of water, it is the largest lake within the City and County of Denver and the centrepiece of Sloan's Lake Park, one of the city's largest urban parks, with a 2.6-mile paved path ringing the water. Denver is the Mile High City, with a benchmark elevation of 5,280 feet. To the east stands the skyline that this vista frames, including Republic Plaza at 714 feet, completed in 1984 and Denver's tallest building. To the west, on a clear day, the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains rises behind the neighbourhoods of Edgewater and Wheat Ridge. The park and the path are open year-round.
The lake exists by accident. In the 1860s, Thomas Sloan was digging a well on his land in what was then prairie west of the young city of Denver. He struck an artesian aquifer, and the underground water flooded his field. Within days the spring had filled a broad shallow basin, and the new lake covered roughly the same footprint it does now. The water still rises from groundwater rather than from a feeder stream, which keeps it unusually still. That stillness is why photographers come at dawn, when the skyline doubles cleanly in the surface. Sloan's Lake is also the only lake within the City and County of Denver where motorised boats are permitted, a longstanding exception in the city park rules.
The view earns its reputation in the half-hour before sunrise. Downtown Denver sits due east of the lake's western shore, which means the sun rises behind the skyline. For about twenty minutes the buildings stand as a black silhouette against an orange sky, their interior lights still on, and the lake, held flat by the morning calm, repeats the image in reverse. The skyline is dense for a Western city: Republic Plaza, the Wells Fargo Center (locally called the 'cash register building' for its arched top), and 1144 Fifteenth Street cluster at its centre. The Front Range lies west of the viewer and pinks a few minutes after the city does, when the light reaches the front of the peaks.