Houghton Lake
— the inland sea the state keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
Houghton Lake, 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.
“Michigan's largest inland lake, twenty thousand acres held inside Roscommon County. Bass and pike in summer, shanties and ice augers from January through February. Tip-Up Town has opened the same way for seventy-five winters: two long weekends, a parade across the ice, fried smelt from the booths along the south shore.
The place, in three passes.
Houghton Lake covers 20,044 acres in Roscommon County, in the north-central Lower Peninsula. It is the largest inland lake wholly within Michigan, and the source of the Muskegon River, which runs west to Lake Michigan. Average depth is about twenty feet, with a maximum near twenty-two. The basin was scoured out by the retreating Wisconsin glacier roughly ten thousand years ago. The town of Houghton Lake sits on the southwest shore, with Prudenville and the village of Roscommon ringing the rest of the perimeter.
The lake runs four sharp seasons. May through September is small-craft and bass season, with northern pike, walleye, and bluegill working the weed beds along the south shore. The first hard freeze usually arrives by mid-December, and the shanty villages assemble out on the ice within the week. Tip-Up Town USA has run on the third and fourth weekends of January since 1951, drawing roughly fifty thousand visitors a year for the parade across the ice and the ice-fishing tournaments that follow into February.
Houghton Lake is reached from US-127 north of Lansing, about a two-hour drive, with M-55 carrying the south shore and Old US-27 the west. Public boat launches operate from Memorial Day through October at Lakeside Park and at the state-managed access near Prudenville. Winter visitors come for the Tip-Up Town festival in January and the tournaments that follow through February. The chamber posts ice-thickness reports each morning during the hard-water season. Cabin rentals concentrate along the south and west shores; most are family-held for decades.
