Orlando
— — the warm hour after a thunderstorm passes.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of lakes more than a city of streets — more than a hundred inside the limits, with a thunderhead that arrives most summer afternoons around four and is gone by six. The parks lie south, in the flatwoods of Orange County. The older Orlando holds around Lake Eola, where the swans were swimming long before the highways arrived. — from the studio
Orlando, 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.
Orlando sits in the middle of the Florida peninsula, about fifty miles inland from the Atlantic, surrounded by a chain of more than a hundred named lakes carved by ancient sinkholes in the limestone bedrock. The city was incorporated in 1875 as a cattle and citrus town; today the metropolitan area holds about 2.7 million people, with Walt Disney World opening in 1971 about twenty miles southwest in unincorporated Orange County. The historic core gathers around Lake Eola downtown, where the city's first water-front park was set aside in 1892.
Central Florida's water sits close to the surface. The Floridan aquifer feeds first-magnitude springs at Wekiwa and Rock Springs north of the city, each pushing tens of millions of gallons a day at a steady 72 degrees. Inside the city, Lake Apopka — the fourth-largest in Florida at about 30,000 acres — anchors the western edge, while smaller lakes like Eola, Ivanhoe, and Underhill thread the older neighborhoods. The water table sits so high that downtown drainage was a defining engineering problem from the city's first decade.
Orlando keeps two calendars. The subtropical one runs from a dry winter in the sixties through a wet season that lasts roughly June through October, with afternoon thunderstorms most days and an Atlantic hurricane window that peaks in September. The parks calendar runs alongside it: Epcot's International Food and Wine Festival in autumn, the Mardi Gras and Halloween Horror Nights runs at Universal, the holiday parties at Magic Kingdom through December. Locals plan around both — mornings belong to errands, afternoons to the storm, evenings to whatever opens after.