Oval Beach Saugatuck
— the sand that holds the day's warmth past dark.
Not only on a wall.
Oval Beach Saugatuck, 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 long crescent of soft sand on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, reached down a wooden boardwalk through the dune grass. The water turns over slow here, blue on the calm days, slate when the wind comes off the lake. Late August evenings the beach empties out by nine and the dunes hold the last of the warmth.
The place, in three passes.
Oval Beach sits on the Lake Michigan shore just west of Saugatuck, in Allegan County, Michigan. The beach runs roughly a quarter mile of fine quartz sand backed by wooded dunes that rise more than a hundred feet behind the water. Access is by a short walk over a boardwalk from the parking lot off Perryman Street. The town of Saugatuck, a former lumber port turned arts colony, sits across the Kalamazoo River two miles inland. The lake water is unsalted and cold into June, warming through August.
Lake Michigan reaches across to Wisconsin without another shore in sight, more than eighty miles of open freshwater west to Milwaukee. The colour shifts with the wind and the angle of the sun, from a clear turquoise on still mornings to a working slate when storms move in off the lake. Swimmers should watch for rip currents that form around the Kalamazoo River outlet to the south. Surface temperatures climb into the high sixties through July and top seventy in a warm August before falling back in September.
The Saugatuck shore wakes up after Memorial Day and runs hard through Labor Day. July weekends fill the lot by mid-morning; weekday evenings empty out by sunset. Local visitors return in late September when the dune grass goes gold and the water still holds summer warmth for a week or two. The town's gallery openings and the Ox-Bow arts campus pull a steady stream of visitors all summer. Winter closes the beach to most casual traffic, though the dunes remain open to walkers who know what they came for.
