Des Moines
— — the gold dome that catches the late summer light.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital that holds its scale. The State Capitol's gold dome sits on a low rise east of the river, the only state capitol dome in the country sheathed in 23-karat leaf, and the rest of downtown keeps a quieter profile beneath it. The Pappajohn Sculpture Park drops a Borofsky, a Plensa, and a Hadid across two blocks of grass. Every August the State Fair pulls the rest of Iowa in.
Des Moines, 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.
Des Moines sits at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers in south-central Iowa, the state capital since 1857. The city proper holds about 214,000 residents and anchors a metro of roughly 700,000. The Iowa State Capitol, completed in 1886, rises east of the river on the only state capitol grounds in the United States crowned by a 23-karat gold-leaf dome, along with four smaller copper-and-gold cupolas. The Principal Financial Group and a dense cluster of insurers earned the city its long-standing nickname as the Hartford of the West.
Two events define the year. The Iowa State Fair runs eleven days each August on the east-side fairgrounds, drawing roughly a million visitors and the butter cow first sculpted in 1911. Every four years the Iowa Caucuses turn the city into the first contest of the United States presidential nominating calendar, with candidates working diners along Ingersoll Avenue from autumn through January. In between, the Des Moines Arts Festival in late June and the Downtown Farmers' Market on Saturdays from May to October carry the calendar.
Downtown is walkable and quiet on weekends, with a skywalk system that connects most office blocks four stories up, useful in January and less so in August. The Pappajohn Sculpture Park stretches across two blocks of Western Gateway Park and is open without charge from dawn to midnight. The Des Moines Art Center, designed by Eliel Saarinen with later additions by I. M. Pei and Richard Meier, sits west of downtown and admits visitors free. The East Village district keeps the independent shops and the better breakfast counters.