Garden Grove
— — the glass that catches the afternoon.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat grid of streets between Anaheim and the freeway, with one extraordinary building at the centre — the all-glass cathedral Philip Johnson finished in 1980, now Christ Cathedral. Around it, Vietnamese pho houses and a strawberry festival that has run every May since 1958. The Southern California light here is the long kind, and the building was designed to hold it.
Garden Grove, 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.
Garden Grove sits in central Orange County, California, about ten miles south of Anaheim and twenty-eight miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The city was incorporated in 1956 and covers eighteen square miles of the coastal plain, with a population of around 170,000. It is best known for Christ Cathedral, the 10,000-pane glass building designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee that opened in 1980 as the Crystal Cathedral and was acquired by the Catholic Diocese of Orange in 2012. The western edge of the city meets the Vietnamese commercial corridor that continues into Little Saigon in neighbouring Westminster.
The cathedral's frame is a star-pattern steel space truss holding 10,660 panes of silvered glass, conceived by Philip Johnson as a greenhouse for sound and light rather than a traditional sanctuary. Its 236-foot prism stayed the tallest glass structure of its kind for decades. After the Crystal Cathedral Ministries bankruptcy in 2010, the Diocese of Orange bought the building for $57.5 million, and Rios Clementi Hale Studios reshaped the interior with movable quatrefoil shades to soften the desert light for Catholic liturgy. The first Mass in the renamed Christ Cathedral was held in July 2019.
Garden Grove holds the Strawberry Festival every Memorial Day weekend, a four-day fair that has run since 1958 and now draws around 250,000 people to Village Green Park. The festival is a memorial to the city's pre-suburban era, when berry fields ran from here to Westminster and were tended largely by Japanese American families before the wartime incarceration of 1942. A parade of marching bands, a carnival, and a very large strawberry shortcake share the park grounds. The growers are long gone, but a handful of stalls still bring fruit from Oxnard each year.