Lomaki Pueblo Wupatki
— a small house left standing in the wind.
Not only on a wall.
Lomaki Pueblo Wupatki, 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.
“Lomaki sits at the north end of Wupatki National Monument, a two-story masonry pueblo built about nine centuries ago and abandoned by the late 1200s. The name comes from the Hopi word for 'beautiful house.' The walls are slabbed sandstone, the colour of the ground around them; the doorways still open onto the same view of the San Francisco Peaks. A short trail loops from the pull-off through the adjacent Box Canyon dwellings and back.
The place, in three passes.
Lomaki Pueblo sits at the north end of Wupatki National Monument, about 35 miles northeast of Flagstaff and a few miles south of the Little Colorado River gorge. The pueblo was built around the year 1190, occupied for roughly a century, and abandoned by the 1280s along with the rest of Wupatki. It is one of more than 800 documented Ancestral Puebloan sites in the monument, which spans 35,422 acres of high desert grassland between Sunset Crater Volcano and the Painted Desert. The Hopi name Lomaki means 'beautiful house.'
The walls are built of slabs of Moenkopi sandstone, the same red-brown formation that surfaces across the monument. The slabs were quarried on site, set with clay mortar, and laid in even courses up to two stories tall, the second floor accessed by a ladder through a hatchway. Lomaki sits at the head of a small box canyon, and one wall of the pueblo uses the canyon edge itself for footing. The Park Service stabilizes the standing walls without rebuilding; what visitors see is, in large part, what eight centuries of weather left.
Lomaki is reached from US-89 north of Flagstaff via the Sunset Crater–Wupatki loop road; the trailhead is a small pull-off at the north end of the loop, about 14 miles past the visitor center. A flat, paved quarter-mile trail leads to the pueblo and the adjacent Box Canyon dwellings. Wupatki National Monument charges a per-vehicle entrance fee, shared with Sunset Crater Volcano next door. The monument is open through the year; spring and autumn are mildest. Summer afternoon temperatures push above 90°F, and the trail offers no shade.
