Allerton Garden Kauai Ceramic Art Tile
— the green a valley keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“Allerton Garden runs the length of the Lawai Valley on the south shore of Kauai. Robert Allerton, a Chicago philanthropist, bought the property in 1938. It had been Queen Emma's summer retreat in the 1870s before that. He and his son spent the next twenty-five years building the gardens out as a sequence of outdoor rooms: a Mermaid Pool, a Diana Fountain, a Thanksgiving Room held by clipped hedge. The Moreton Bay fig grove at the far end is the one filmed for the dinosaur-egg scene in the first Jurassic Park. The Lawai Stream runs through the property to the sea, and the canopy keeps the air cool all the way down.
Allerton Garden Kauai 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.
Allerton Garden sits at the mouth of the Lawai Valley on the south shore of Kauai, about eighty acres of cultivated tropical landscape running from a hillside estate house down to the Pacific. The lower valley had been Queen Emma of Hawaii's summer retreat in the 1870s and later passed to the McBryde family, who farmed it before selling to Robert Allerton, a Chicago philanthropist, in 1938. Robert and his son John Gregg Allerton spent the next twenty-five years designing the gardens. Since 1971 the property has been part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a Congressionally chartered nonprofit founded in 1964. The adjacent McBryde Garden, also NTBG, extends inland up the same valley.
The garden's structure was designed by John Gregg Allerton, who studied landscape architecture, as a sequence of outdoor rooms separated by hedges, walls, and changes in level. A Diana Fountain in carved marble holds the upper terrace; a Mermaid Fountain by the American sculptor Marshall Fredericks stands in a pool fed by the Lawai Stream; the Thanksgiving Room is a clipped-hedge enclosure named for the day the design was set. The Moreton Bay fig grove at the seaward end is the buttress-rooted stand featured in the 1993 film Jurassic Park, the trees planted in the 1940s and now well over twenty meters tall. The architecture frames the planting; the planting holds the architecture in place.
Allerton Garden is open by guided tour only. The visitor center sits on Lawai Road just outside Poipu, and reservations are made through the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The standard tour runs about two and a half hours, descends roughly two hundred feet into the valley by foot path, and operates Monday through Saturday. The adjacent McBryde Garden is offered as a self-guided walk on the same days. Tour groups are kept small to keep voices low along the stream, and the path includes uneven ground and a few steep sections. Brief afternoon showers are frequent in any season. The garden does not sell tickets at the gate, and Lawai Road has limited parking.