Gold Coast
— — seventy kilometres of surf, towers, and warm sand.
Not only on a wall.
“A long strip of Pacific coast in southeast Queensland, an hour south of Brisbane, where the high-rises of Surfers Paradise hold the skyline above a beach that runs more than seventy kilometres unbroken. The Coral Sea comes in warm most of the year. Behind the towers the hinterland climbs quickly into Lamington and Springbrook, subtropical rainforest that drops creek lines straight back down to the coast. A morning on the sand and an afternoon under the canopy is a fair day out. from the studio
Gold Coast, 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.
The place, in three passes.
The Gold Coast is a coastal city in southeast Queensland, Australia, about 80 kilometres south of Brisbane and immediately north of the New South Wales border. Its built-up strip runs along roughly 70 kilometres of Pacific coastline, with Surfers Paradise as the central beachfront district. The city's population is near 700,000, which makes it the sixth-largest city in Australia and the largest non-capital city in the country. Inland from the towers, the McPherson Range rises into Lamington and Springbrook national parks, both part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The surf along the Gold Coast is steady because the coast faces directly into the Pacific swell window with few offshore islands to shadow it. Snapper Rocks at the south end produces the long right-hand point break known as the Superbank, formed after the Tweed River sand-bypass system began pumping sand around the river mouth in 2001. The Quiksilver Pro at Snapper Rocks has opened the men's professional surfing world tour for most years since 2002. Sea temperatures run roughly 21 Celsius in winter and 26 in summer, warm enough that most local surfers go without a wetsuit through summer.
Twenty minutes inland the air shifts. The McPherson Range climbs into Lamington National Park, established in 1915 and rising to 1,142 metres at Mount Bithongabel. The park holds some of the most extensive subtropical rainforest in Australia, including stands of Antarctic beech, Nothofagus moorei, more than 2,000 years old. Springbrook National Park to the south carries the Natural Bridge, a basalt arch hollowed out under a waterfall, and is one of the few accessible places in Australia to see glow-worms in number. Both parks sit within the Gondwana Rainforests World Heritage area.