Mustique
— — a small island that keeps its own quiet.
Not only on a wall.
“A private island of about fourteen hundred acres in the Grenadines. Nine beaches around a granite spine, a single bar at Britannia Bay called Basil's, the road that loops past Macaroni and Lagoon. Reachable only by small plane from Barbados or by boat from Bequia. The kind of place that keeps a guestbook instead of a brochure.
Mustique, 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.
Mustique sits in the Grenadines chain of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, about a hundred kilometres south of Saint Vincent itself and a short hop from Bequia. The island is roughly 1,400 acres of volcanic rock and white sand, owned and run by the Mustique Company, a cooperative of homeowners that has managed it since 1989. Access is by light aircraft to a single airstrip at Britannia Bay, or by yacht. The interior road loops nine named beaches, from Macaroni on the Atlantic side to Lagoon on the Caribbean.
There are roughly a hundred private villas on the island and no resort hotels in the conventional sense. The Cotton House, a single small inn carved from an eighteenth-century plantation building near Endeavour Bay, holds about twenty rooms. Day-trippers are not welcomed and cruise traffic is capped at zero. Princess Margaret kept a house here, Les Jolies Eaux, from 1960; it set the pattern. The quiet that buyers come for is enforced by the rule book of the Mustique Company more than by remoteness alone.
Macaroni Beach is the postcard, a long curve of white sand on the Atlantic side broken by basalt outcrops. The reefs off Lagoon and Britannia Bay sit in the broader Tobago Cays marine zone, with seagrass meadows where green turtles graze. Water temperature holds between 26 and 29 degrees Celsius through the year. The dry season runs January through May; the rains arrive in late summer with the trade-wind reversal and the small chance of a passing hurricane in September.