Huntsville
— — the town the rockets were built in.
Not only on a wall.
“A north Alabama town that became the country's rocket city. Huntsville sits in the Tennessee Valley at the foot of Monte Sano, the long flat-topped ridge that holds the eastern edge of the city. Cotton Row downtown still carries the brick fronts of the 19th-century mercantile blocks; out at Redstone Arsenal, Marshall Space Flight Center has built engines for every American crewed rocket since the Saturn V. The colour the studio reaches for is the warm red brick of the old square against the long green of the ridge, with a Saturn V standing in the distance like a downtown spire.
Huntsville, 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.
Huntsville is the largest city in Alabama, with a population that crossed 225,000 in the 2020 census and has continued to grow. It sits in the Tennessee Valley in the north of the state, in Madison County, at the foot of Monte Sano Mountain, a Cumberland Plateau outlier rising about 500 metres. Founded in 1805 as the first incorporated town in what would become Alabama, Huntsville served briefly as the first state capital. The economy is now anchored by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal on the south side of town, with a heavy engineering and aerospace workforce.
Huntsville is the United States' Rocket City. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, established at Redstone Arsenal in 1960 under Wernher von Braun, developed the Saturn V that carried Apollo to the Moon and has since led propulsion work for the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station modules, and the Space Launch System now flying Artemis. The adjacent U.S. Space and Rocket Center holds the world's largest collection of rockets and space hardware, including a full Saturn V displayed horizontally in the Davidson Center, a National Historic Landmark since 1987. Downtown, the Twickenham Historic District preserves one of the largest concentrations of antebellum homes in the state.
The U.S. Space and Rocket Center sits about 13 kilometres west of downtown along Interstate 565 and is open year-round; it is also the host site for Space Camp, which has trained more than a million participants since 1982. Monte Sano State Park, on the ridge east of town, offers 35 kilometres of hiking trails and the long view back over the valley at sunset. Downtown holds Big Spring Park, the limestone spring that drew the city's first settlement, and the Cotton Row historic block on Courthouse Square. Spring and autumn are the easiest seasons; high summer in the Tennessee Valley runs hot and humid.