Retiro Park Crystal Palace reflecting pond
— a glasshouse holding the afternoon still.
Not only on a wall.
Retiro Park Crystal Palace reflecting pond, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Built in 1887 to shelter Philippine flora, the Palacio de Cristal sits at the south end of the Retiro, mirrored in a small artificial pond. Bald cypresses rise straight out of the water, their roots breaking the surface. On a quiet weekday, the glass takes the colour of whatever the sky is doing, and the ducks do most of the talking. It is now an outpost of the Reina Sofía, used for slow contemporary installations that the room itself was made for. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Palacio de Cristal stands in the southern half of the Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid's 125-hectare central park, a short walk from the Puerta de Alcalá. Designed by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco and completed in 1887, it was built to display tropical plants from the Philippines for that year's Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas. The structure is iron-framed glass on a brick base, with a small artificial pond at its feet planted with bald cypresses. Since 1990 the building has belonged to the Museo Reina Sofía, which programmes it as a contemporary art space.
The whole point of the building is what light does inside it. The glass walls rise about 22 metres at the central dome, and the pond outside doubles every angle of sky back through the structure. Mornings give the interior a flat northern wash; late afternoon turns the iron ribs warm and throws long lattice shadows across the floor. In winter the bald cypresses, Taxodium distichum, lose their needles and the reflection sharpens. Artists who exhibit here, including Cristina Iglesias and Doris Salcedo, work with the room as much as inside it.
Admission is free. The Retiro is open daily from around 6 a.m. to midnight in summer and closes earlier in winter; the Palacio de Cristal itself keeps shorter museum hours that shift with each installation, so the Reina Sofía calendar is the source to check. The nearest Metro stop is Atocha on Line 1, with Retiro on Line 2 about ten minutes' walk north. The park, the building, and the surrounding Paseo del Prado were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 under the name Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro.
