Nantucket
— — grey shingles, white fog, blue water.
Not only on a wall.
“An island the colour of weathered cedar. Nantucket sits thirty miles out from Cape Cod in the open Atlantic, low and grey under its own particular fog. Once the whaling capital of the world, now a town of cobblestones and shingle houses. The light off the water is its own thing entirely, even in August.
Nantucket, 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.
Nantucket lies thirty miles south of Cape Cod in the open Atlantic, a low crescent of glacial moraine roughly fourteen miles long. The island, town, and county share boundaries, one of only a few such cases in Massachusetts. Year-round population sits near 14,000, swelling above 80,000 each summer. English settlers established the town in 1659; by 1840 it was the world's whaling capital, sending more ships to sea than any other port. The fleet's collapse after the great fire of 1846 froze the town in time.
Nantucket's nickname, the Grey Lady, comes from the fog that wraps the island most mornings between June and September. Warm Gulf Stream air meeting the cool Labrador-current waters offshore generates persistent advection fog. The light at dawn reads silver-white, the houses' weathered cedar shingles softening into the haze. By midday the fog usually burns off, and the afternoon sky over the harbour holds a particular high blue that the island's painters have chased for two centuries with mixed success.
Main Street's cobblestones, laid in the 1830s with ballast stones from returning whaleships, still carry traffic through the historic district. The Nantucket Whaling Museum on Broad Street holds a forty-six-foot sperm whale skeleton and the original Fresnel lens from Sankaty Head Light. Sconset village, seven miles east, keeps its rose-covered fishermen's cottages along Baxter Road. The ferry from Hyannis takes about an hour fast, two and a quarter on the standard boat, with daily service in every season.