Lanikai Mokulua Oahu Ceramic Art Tile
— two islands across a sea the wind forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A narrow strip of sand on the windward side of Oʻahu, in the Lanikai neighborhood south of Kailua. Two small islands sit offshore: Moku Nui and Moku Iki, known locally as the Mokes. A reef breaks the swell a quarter-mile out, which is why the lagoon between the beach and the islands holds the colour it does. Moku Nui has a small beach you can kayak to. Moku Iki is a seabird sanctuary and closed to landing. Sunrise is what Lanikai is for. The sun comes up behind the islands and the sea takes its colour from underneath.
Lanikai Mokulua Oahu 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.
Lanikai is a residential neighborhood on the windward (eastern) coast of Oʻahu, immediately south of Kailua town and roughly 13 miles east of downtown Honolulu over the Nuʻuanu Pali. The beach itself is about half a mile long, fronting private homes with public access through a handful of narrow shoreline rights-of-way. Half a mile offshore lie the Mokulua Islands: Moku Nui ('big island') and Moku Iki ('small island'), twin volcanic islets that are part of the Hawaiʻi State Seabird Sanctuary, administered by the Division of Forestry and Wildlife. The older Hawaiian name for the surrounding ahupuaʻa is Kaʻōhao; the name 'Lanikai' was coined in 1924 by developer Charles Frazier.
The water at Lanikai is unusually calm because an offshore fringing reef breaks the open-ocean swell about a quarter-mile from the beach, leaving the lagoon between the sand and the Mokuluas flat for most of the year. The pale turquoise comes from sunlight bouncing off a shallow white-sand bottom through clear, low-sediment water, the same optical reason Caribbean and South Pacific lagoons read that colour. Kayaks launched from Kailua Beach Park cross to Moku Nui, where a small sand beach on the leeward side is the only spot where landing is permitted. The State of Hawaiʻi prohibits landing on Moku Iki.
Lanikai faces east, which makes it one of the more reliable sunrise vistas on Oʻahu. The sun rises behind the Mokuluas for most of the year, lifting the twin silhouettes out of the dark water before the rest of the beach is awake. Civil twilight in Kailua begins about 25 minutes before sunrise, and the colour starts then. The Kaʻiwa Ridge Trail, locally the 'Pillbox Hike', climbs the ridge directly behind Lanikai and reaches the first of three World War II observation bunkers in about 20 minutes, from which the Mokuluas sit centred against the sea. The trail is open from dawn but unlit, so headlamps are standard for pre-sunrise climbs.