Paradise Island
— the long pale beach the Atlantic keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A four-mile coral island off the north shore of New Providence, joined to Nassau by two bridges across the harbour. Until 1962 it was called Hog Island. Hartford renamed it, and Sol Kerzner's Atlantis followed in the 1990s, but the long pale arc of Cabbage Beach on the Atlantic side runs the same as it always has, turquoise shading to the deep blue line where the shelf drops off.
Paradise 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.
Paradise Island lies just off the north shore of New Providence, separated from downtown Nassau by a narrow harbour and joined to the city by two parallel road bridges built in 1966 and 1998. The island runs roughly four miles long and a half-mile wide, about six and a half square kilometres, along the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean. Until American developer Huntington Hartford bought and renamed it in 1962 the island was called Hog Island; the harbour-side ridge still carries the French cloister he reassembled there stone by stone.
The Atlantic-facing shore is Cabbage Beach, a continuous three-mile crescent of white aragonite sand whose grains come from the broken-down skeletons of marine organisms on the shallow Bahamas Bank. The water close in reads pale turquoise; the deeper line a few hundred metres out marks the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean trench, which drops to over two thousand metres within sight of the beach. The colour change is sharper here than almost anywhere in the Caribbean basin, and it holds through the long flat afternoons.
Cabbage Beach is public above the high-water mark, accessible by foot from the eastern end of Casino Drive or by water taxi from Prince George Wharf in Nassau (about ten minutes across the harbour). The Atlantis resort grounds are open to day passes; the older Hartford cloister and Versailles Gardens are free to walk. Hurricane season runs June through November, with the strongest risk in September. The quiet end of Cabbage Beach is the easternmost half-mile, past the last resort property line.