McKinney
— — the courthouse square, slow on a Saturday.
Not only on a wall.
“The county seat of Collin County, an hour's drive north of downtown Dallas. The square is the kind a town builds when it still expects people to walk to it — a brick courthouse at the centre, hardware stores and a few quiet bars on the surrounding blocks. Locals keep the rhythm easy. The crowd thins out by ten on a weeknight.
McKinney, 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.
McKinney is the county seat of Collin County, Texas, about 32 miles north of downtown Dallas along U.S. Highway 75. The city was founded in 1848 and named for Collin McKinney, one of the five drafters and signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. The 1875 Collin County Courthouse anchors the historic square and has been restored as the McKinney Performing Arts Center. The city has grown past 220,000 residents and is among the fastest-growing in Texas, though the original twelve-block downtown still reads as a small Texas county seat.
The brickwork is the through-line. Most of the downtown square dates from the 1880s through the 1910s, load-bearing red brick made from local clay with limestone sills and pressed-tin cornices. The 1875 courthouse is Second Empire in style, with a mansard roof added during an 1876 expansion. McKinney's historic district covers roughly 175 acres and lists more than 150 contributing structures on the National Register, one of the larger intact 19th-century commercial cores in north Texas.
The square is open and walkable any day. The McKinney Performing Arts Center, housed in the old courthouse, runs a regular calendar of concerts and theatre. Two miles southeast, the Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary preserves 289 acres of Blackland Prairie, open Tuesday through Sunday. Second Saturdays bring an arts walk through the downtown galleries. Saturday mornings the McKinney Farmers Market runs at Chestnut Square, the city's restored 19th-century homestead district.