Mauna Kea Beach Hotel Big Island Ceramic Art Tile
— the white the lava lets through.
Not only on a wall.
“A half-moon of pale sand pressed into a coast otherwise made of black lava. Hawaiians called the bay Kaunaʻoa for a small native vine that once grew on the rocks behind it. Laurance Rockefeller saw it from a boat in 1960 and opened the hotel four years later, on a stretch of Kohala Coast nobody else thought worth the water it would take to plumb it. After dark, lights from the seawall draw the manta rays in along the point. People stand at the railing and don't say much.
Mauna Kea Beach Hotel Big Island 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.
The Mauna Kea Beach Hotel sits on Kaunaʻoa Bay on the Kohala Coast of Hawaiʻi Island, the largest of the Hawaiian islands. Laurance S. Rockefeller commissioned the hotel after Governor William F. Quinn invited him in 1960 to identify a resort site on the dry leeward coast. Rockefeller chose the bay from a boat, took a long lease on the land from the State of Hawaiʻi, and opened the hotel on July 24, 1965 [1]. The building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Charles Bassett as principal architect. The companion golf course, completed in 1964, was Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s first design in Hawaiʻi [2]. The hotel is now operated under Marriott's Autograph Collection.
Beyond the beach, the hotel is known for the Pan-Pacific art collection Laurance Rockefeller assembled to fill the public spaces: roughly 1,600 pieces by the time the building opened, sourced from across India, Asia, and Oceania. The signature work is a seventh-century pink granite Buddha from southern India, set in a small landing on the way to the lobby. The architecture is mid-century modern in the tropical idiom, with open-air corridors, lava-rock walls, and no glass between the lobby and the trade winds. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the building as an early demonstration that a five-star resort could leave its windows open in Hawaiʻi, with the climate doing the cooling [1].
Kaunaʻoa Bay is a public beach. Hawaiʻi law guarantees access to all shorelines below the high-water mark, and the hotel maintains a small allotment of day-visitor parking passes distributed at the gatehouse on a first-come basis from morning; arrivals after mid-morning often find them gone. The crescent is roughly a quarter-mile long, with usually-calm water and Hawaiian green sea turtles cycling through. After sunset, lights mounted on the seawall at the south end of the bay draw Pacific manta rays in to feed on plankton; the railing above has been a known viewing spot since the hotel opened in 1965 [1].