Nuku Hiva
— the green that rises straight out of the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest island of the Marquesas, 1,400 kilometres north-east of Tahiti. Basalt cliffs lift straight out of the Pacific. The main town, Taiohae, sits in the curve of a drowned crater. Herman Melville jumped a whaling ship here in 1842; the book he wrote, Typee, is the one most read outside the islands. Roughly three thousand people live in six valleys cut by the wind from the trade-wind side.
Nuku Hiva, 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.
Nuku Hiva is the largest island of the Marquesas Archipelago, a French overseas collectivity in the South Pacific about 1,400 kilometres north-east of Tahiti and roughly 4,800 kilometres south of Hawaii. It covers around 340 square kilometres and rises to 1,224 metres at Mount Tekao. The administrative seat is Taiohae, set in a deep flooded caldera on the south coast, home to about half of the island's roughly 3,000 inhabitants. The archipelago entered the French protectorate in 1842, the same year Melville landed.
The Marquesas were thrown up over a hotspot under the Pacific plate roughly four to five million years ago, and Nuku Hiva is among the older islands of the chain. Erosion has cut the original shield volcano into a ring of high basalt cliffs and deep amphitheatre valleys. The Vaipo waterfall in the Hakaui valley falls about 350 metres in a single drop and is among the tallest in French Polynesia. Tiki figures carved from red volcanic stone still stand on the meae platforms at Hatiheu and Kamuihei.
Nuku Hiva is reached by air from Tahiti, about three and a half hours on Air Tahiti's ATR turboprop, three or four flights a week, into Nuku Ataha Airport on the dry north-west tip, then a winding ninety-minute road to Taiohae. The freighter Aranui 5 calls every three weeks, carrying both cargo and a small number of passengers. There are no large resorts. Diving, horse-trekking the Hakaui valley, and the marae at Hatiheu are the usual reasons people come.