Lookout Studio
— a small stone room built to disappear into the cliff.
Not only on a wall.
Lookout Studio, 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.
“A low stone building at the very edge of the South Rim, set so close to the drop that the rough masonry seems to grow from the limestone itself. Mary Colter drew it in 1914 to look as if the canyon had built it. From the back terrace the Bright Angel Trail switches down into the inner gorge, and the Colorado River shows only as a line of shadow.
The place, in three passes.
Lookout Studio sits at the rim of the Grand Canyon a short walk west of Bright Angel Lodge in Grand Canyon Village. Architect Mary Colter designed it in 1914 for the Fred Harvey Company as a photo studio and observation point, intentionally massed from rough Kaibab limestone so its silhouette would read as part of the cliff. The building is a contributing structure in the Grand Canyon Village National Historic Landmark District.
The walls are dry-laid Kaibab limestone gathered nearby, broken on uneven courses so the roofline imitates the natural ledges of the rim. Colter studied the Ancestral Puebloan ruins of the Southwest before drawing the plan and wanted the studio to look weathered from the day it opened. The chimney is asymmetric on purpose. From the trail below the building can be hard to pick out against the cliff.
The studio is open daily, free with park admission, and operated by the park concessioner as a small shop and viewpoint. Two terraces step down toward the rim with stone benches and a clear line of sight across to the North Rim, ten miles across as the raven flies. Sunrise and the last hour before sunset draw the largest groups; mid-morning in winter is the quietest stretch.
