Step into one of the great surviving Arts and Crafts potteries in America. Pewabic Pottery was founded in 1903 by Mary Chase Perry Stratton, a ceramicist who developed a luminous, unpredictable iridescent glaze that became her signature, its colors shifting like oil on water. This Tudor Revival workshop, purpose-built in 1907, has produced handmade tiles ever since.
Pewabic tile lines the floors and fountains of buildings across Detroit and far beyond, from the Guardian Building downtown to churches, libraries, and even the National Cathedral and New York subway stations. Stratton named the pottery after a copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the word means clay of copper color in Ojibwe. The pottery survived the Depression, Stratton's death, and decades of change, and it still operates today as a working studio, school, and museum.
Step inside to see the glazes glowing on the walls, then notice the building's own tiled details, a craft tradition kept alive by hand for more than a century.