Sumbawa Island
— the dry island the volcano left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“The island east of Lombok and west of Flores. Drier than its neighbours, with long stretches of savannah running down to surf coves like Lakey Peak. The peak of Tambora sits in the north, its caldera six kilometres across since the 1815 eruption. People come for the waves, the honey, the road that does not end where the ferry leaves you.
Sumbawa Island, 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.
Sumbawa is the larger, drier island between Lombok and Flores in Indonesia's Lesser Sunda chain, covering about 15,448 square kilometres across two regencies: the Sumbawanese west and the Bimanese east, each with its own sultanate history and language. The Trans-Sumbawa road runs the long axis from Poto Tano on the western ferry to Sape on the eastern, where boats leave for Komodo. Savannah and dry monsoon forest replace the rice terraces of Bali; the dry season runs roughly May through October.
The volcano in the island's north peninsula, Mount Tambora, produced the largest eruption in recorded human history in April 1815, a VEI 7 event that decapitated the mountain from roughly 4,300 metres to today's 2,850 and left a caldera six kilometres wide and over a kilometre deep. Ash circled the globe and dimmed the next year's growing season into the so-called Year Without a Summer of 1816, which prompted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at a chilled Lake Geneva.
The south coast village of Hu'u, in Dompu Regency, holds the cluster of reef breaks the surf world calls Lakey: Lakey Peak, Lakey Pipe, Periscopes, Cobblestones, Nungas, all within a few kilometres of one another. The trade winds blow offshore from April through October, when the southern hemisphere swell arrives steady and head-high or larger. The original surf camps opened in the 1980s and the bay still draws regulars who treat it as a quieter alternative to Uluwatu on Bali.