Surprise
— — a town named for a small private joke.
Not only on a wall.
“Founded in 1938 by Flora Mae Statler, who is said to have remarked she would be surprised if the place ever amounted to much. It amounted to about 150,000 people and a spring-training stadium shared by the Rangers and the Royals. Saguaros stand on the edge of subdivisions; the White Tank Mountains hold the western horizon. The light at six in the morning, before the heat, is the thing. from the studio
Surprise, 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.
Surprise sits in the northwest corner of metropolitan Phoenix, in Maricopa County's West Valley, at about 1,150 feet of elevation in the Sonoran Desert. Flora Mae Statler founded the town in 1938 on a single square mile of land. It incorporated in 1960 with about a thousand residents and now holds roughly 150,000, one of the fastest-growing cities in Arizona. The White Tank Mountains rise west of the city; the Agua Fria River runs along its eastern edge.
The desert here is Lower Sonoran — saguaro, palo verde, creosote, ocotillo — with summer highs above 105°F from June through September and winter days that often sit in the seventies. Annual rainfall is around eight inches, split between brief winter rains and the July-August monsoon, when afternoon thunderheads build over the White Tanks and walls of dust roll in from the south. The dry air keeps the mountain edges sharp at dawn.
Surprise Stadium opened in 2003 as the spring-training home of the Texas Rangers and the Kansas City Royals; Cactus League games run through March. White Tank Mountain Regional Park, fifteen minutes west, holds petroglyphs at the base of Waterfall Canyon and trails that climb to about 4,000 feet. Loop 303 makes the drive from Phoenix Sky Harbor about forty-five minutes outside rush hour. The town runs west along Bell Road and north along Grand Avenue.