Honolua Bay Maui Ceramic Art Tile
— — the bay the rainforest opens onto.
Not only on a wall.
“A north-facing bay on Maui's northwest shore, reached through a half-mile of coastal rainforest. In summer the water turns to glass and green sea turtles graze the coral down to forty feet. In winter the same bay holds the right-hand point break that surf champion Mark Richards once called the best wave in the world. It is also the harbour the Hōkūleʻa sailed from on its first voyage in 1976. The Hawaiians named it Honolua, two bays, for the way Mokuleʻia sits beside it. Locals come for both halves of its year.
Honolua Bay Maui Ceramic Art Tile, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Honolua Bay sits on the northwest coast of Maui, about ten miles north of Lahaina on the Honoapiʻilani Highway, just past the resort village of Kapalua. It is one half of the 45-acre Honolua-Mokuleʻia Marine Life Conservation District, declared protected waters in 1978. The bay opens to the north between basalt cliffs; the western arm rises into Lipoa Point, a 250-acre coastal plateau the State of Hawaiʻi purchased from Maui Land & Pineapple Company in 2014 for $19.5 million to keep it from development. The bay is reached on foot, down a 0.6-mile trail through a corridor of banyan and coastal forest that begins near mile marker 32.5.
The bay is a marine reserve where nothing may be taken: no fish, no shells, no rocks. The bottom is small boulders and silt, with dense coral along both arms in waters ten to forty feet deep, the richer reef hugging the northeastern shore. Green sea turtles graze the algae; humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa, the Hawaiian state fish, move between coral heads with parrotfish, surgeonfish, and wrasse. Summer visibility runs to about fifty feet, when the north-facing opening is sheltered from the trade winds. In winter the same opening that lets light into the water lets in North Pacific groundswell, which builds the long right-hand wave running half the point.
Honolua keeps two seasons. From roughly May through September the bay is calm enough to snorkel; the water clears, the swell drops, and the turtles work the inshore reef. From October into April the same bay receives the long-period swells that travel down the Kalohi Channel between Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi, and the right-hand point break wakes up. The 1965 surf film The Performers put the wave on the world map; Oahu surfers George Downing, Wally Froiseth, and Russ Takaki are credited with the first ride in 1947. The annual women's WSL event, hosted on this point as the Maui Pro, has typically run in December when the swell is most reliable.