Sea Island
— — the hour the live oaks make their own shade.
Not only on a wall.
“A five-mile barrier island at the southern end of Georgia's Golden Isles. Reached by a single causeway over the salt marsh from St. Simons. The Avenue of Oaks runs through the old Retreat plantation grounds; the beach faces east into the morning. Egrets keep to the marsh side. The wind off the Atlantic does most of the talking.
Sea 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.
Sea Island is a five-mile barrier island off the coast of Glynn County, Georgia, joined to St. Simons Island by a short causeway across the salt marsh. It was acquired in 1926 by Detroit industrialist Howard E. Coffin, who opened The Cloister hotel in 1928 on a design by the Palm Beach architect Addison Mizner. The island sits between the Black Banks River and the Atlantic, at roughly thirty-one degrees north. Sea oats and live oaks hold the dunes; the marshes belong to egrets, oysters, and the tide.
Coastal Georgia air carries salt, pluff mud, and the resinous warmth of live oak and longleaf pine. Summer afternoons stack thunderheads over the marsh by four o'clock; winter mornings come in around fifty degrees and clear. Spring brings the pollen of the slash pines down in yellow drifts. The island sits close enough to the Gulf Stream that frost is rare and the sand stays walkable through January. The breeze off the Atlantic almost never quits.
The Cloister, the Lodge, and the Beach Club are private to guests of Sea Island Resort or to club members, and the residential roads behind the gate are likewise private. Public beach access is at East Beach on St. Simons, a short drive west across the causeway. Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island, twenty minutes south, is the freely walkable counterpart. Visitors without a reservation are usually best off staying on St. Simons and looking across the marsh.