Orange
— — the plaza the orange trees made.
Not only on a wall.
“A small grid of brick storefronts around a circular plaza and a fountain, ten miles inland from the Pacific. Orange was laid out in 1869 and grew up on Valencia citrus before the groves gave way to neighbourhoods. The Old Towne historic district covers about a square mile and is the largest National Register district in California. Antique shops, a soda fountain that has been open since 1922, and the kind of evening light the inland basin holds an hour longer than the coast. — from the studio
Orange, 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.
Orange is a city of about 140,000 in northern Orange County, roughly 50 kilometres southeast of downtown Los Angeles and 15 kilometres inland from the Pacific. The city was platted in 1869 by two former Union officers, Andrew Glassell and Alfred Chapman, on land carved out of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. Its defining feature is the Plaza, a circular park with a 1937 fountain at the intersection of Glassell and Chapman streets, surrounded by a one-square-mile grid of mostly intact late-Victorian and early-20th-century commercial buildings.
The Old Towne Orange Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1997, contains roughly 1,300 contributing structures across about 1.3 square kilometres — the largest National Register district in California. The brick along Glassell Street is mostly local, laid between the 1880s and the 1920s. Watson's Soda Fountain, in continuous operation since 1899 at its current location, still serves at a marble counter. The Orange Plaza fountain, installed in 1937 as a WPA-era civic project, replaced an earlier reflecting pool and remains the visual centre of the district.
The city's calendar still tracks the rhythm of its citrus century. The annual Orange International Street Fair has run since 1973 over Labour Day weekend, drawing close to 400,000 visitors across three days to the streets radiating from the Plaza. The Treasure Hunt antique sale runs in spring and autumn. The grove acreage is essentially gone — the last commercial Valencia orchards in the city closed by the 1980s — but the surviving Sunkist Building on West Maple Avenue marks the cooperative's regional headquarters from the period when the fruit defined the place.