Marfa courthouse facade
— pink stone holding the last hour of light.
Not only on a wall.
Marfa courthouse facade, 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.
“The Presidio County Courthouse sits at the head of Highland Avenue, three stories of salmon-pink brick rising to a mansard roof and a cupola you can climb. Alfred Giles drew it in 1886, when Marfa was a railroad water stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line. The pink is not subtle. It is the first thing the morning finds and the last thing the sun leaves. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Marfa sits at 4,685 feet on a high desert plain in Presidio County, between the Davis Mountains to the north and the Chinati Range to the south. The town was founded in 1883 as a water and freight stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway. The courthouse, completed in 1886 at the head of Highland Avenue, became the visual anchor of the grid Reid drove past on his way through Big Bend country. It is the seat of Presidio County and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Alfred Giles, the London-born San Antonio architect responsible for much of South Texas's late-19th-century civic architecture, drew the courthouse in a Second Empire idiom: load-bearing brick walls, a patterned-tin mansard roof, a central cupola open to the four corners of the county. A 2001 restoration returned the exterior to its documented period palette, a soft salmon-pink that surprised some visitors but matched the original 1880s color. A cast-zinc Lady Justice once stood atop the cupola; local accounts hold that a cowboy shot her down sometime in the 1880s and she was never replaced.
The light here is the reason a generation of artists moved to Marfa. At 4,685 feet, on a treeless plain, mornings arrive clear and cold and afternoons stretch long. The hour before sundown turns the courthouse facade from coral to fire-rose to the muted pink of painted brick at dusk. The cupola is open to the public on weekdays and the climb earns a 360-degree view across the grasslands toward the Davis Mountains. Photographers favor the half-hour after sunset, when the building goes lavender and the streetlamps on Highland Avenue come on one at a time.
