Sherman Avenue Aspen Victorians Elk Range Ceramic Art Tile
— gingerbread porches with a fourteener behind them.
Not only on a wall.
“Aspen's West End sits north of Main Street, a grid of nineteenth-century houses left over from the silver boom. About 261 Victorian-era buildings still stand across town, most of them on these few blocks. The streets run quiet under cottonwoods. Behind the rooflines the Elk Range carries on into the high country: Pyramid Peak, the Maroon Bells, Castle Peak, all of them past fourteen thousand feet. The boom barons built their houses to look at those mountains. The mountains, in their slow way, still hold up their end.
Sherman Avenue Aspen Victorians Elk 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.
Aspen sits at 8,000 feet on a flat shelf along the Roaring Fork River, eleven miles west of the Continental Divide on Colorado's Western Slope. The West End is the historic residential quarter north of Main Street and west of the modern downtown, platted in the 1880s when the city briefly surpassed Leadville as the most productive silver-mining district in the United States. The neighbourhood sits between the Wheeler/Stallard Museum campus on its west edge and the Aspen Institute grounds along the river. The city adopted one of Colorado's earliest historic-preservation ordinances in 1972, after a citizens' group called Save the Victorians organised to slow the demolition pace.
The houses are catalogued in The Aspen Inventory of Historic Sites and Structures, the working document the city's Historic Preservation Commission consults whenever an owner wants to alter a registered property. Most date to the silver boom that peaked in 1891 and 1892, then ended in the Panic of 1893: wood-frame Victorians with gabled ells, decorated bargeboards, and turned porch posts, sized for a town that briefly held the wealthiest population per capita in Colorado. The Wheeler/Stallard House, built in 1888 for silver baron and Macy's investor Jerome B. Wheeler, sits on West Bleeker Street and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
The Elk Range carries the southwest skyline. Six fourteeners belong to it: Castle Peak (14,265 feet, the highest), Maroon Peak, Capitol Peak, Snowmass Mountain, Pyramid Peak, and North Maroon Peak, all six standing above fourteen thousand feet. The Maroon Bells, the two peaks that are shorthand for the range, sit about twelve miles southwest of Aspen across the Maroon Creek valley. The range belongs to the Rocky Mountains on the western side of the Continental Divide, mostly in southern Pitkin and northern Gunnison counties. From the West End sidewalks the peaks come and go behind cottonwoods, taller than anything in town.