Durham
— — the brick the tobacco trade left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“The city North Carolinians call Bull City, halfway between Raleigh and Chapel Hill on the Piedmont. Duke's Gothic chapel rises out of pine forest at one end; the old American Tobacco warehouses, brick and water-tower silhouette, hold the other. The light here is southern and slow, and the brick keeps its colour into the evening.
Durham, 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.
Durham sits in the central Piedmont of North Carolina, with roughly 296,000 residents, the third-largest city in the state after Charlotte and Raleigh. Founded as a railroad stop in 1853 and named for Bartlett S. Durham, the physician who deeded the land for the depot, it grew into the centre of American bright-leaf tobacco manufacturing after the Civil War. Duke University, renamed in 1924 after a $40 million endowment from James B. Duke, anchors the western side; the redeveloped American Tobacco Historic District anchors downtown. The city sits about 40 km northwest of Raleigh.
The brick is the through-line. The American Tobacco Campus, a 14-acre complex built starting in the 1890s by W. Duke, Sons & Co. and later operated by American Tobacco Company, was redeveloped from 2004 onward by Capitol Broadcasting, keeping the red brick, the riveted water tower, and the Lucky Strike smokestack. A few blocks west, Duke University's West Campus chapel was built between 1930 and 1932 from Duke Stone, a warm orange-brown volcanic rhyolite quarried near Hillsborough that the architect Julian Abele chose to age in the southern light.
Downtown is walkable. The American Tobacco Campus runs along Blackwell Street and houses the Durham Performing Arts Center, restaurants, and the trailhead of the American Tobacco Trail, a 35 km rail-to-trail south to Apex. Duke's West Campus sits about 3 km west, with the chapel and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens open to the public most days. The Nasher Museum of Art on Duke's campus is ticketed for the public and free for Duke affiliates. Raleigh-Durham International Airport is roughly 25 km southeast.