Our Story
Where Sands Are Coral
When your water taxi from the Eleuthera airport moors in Dunmore Town, a golf cart will chauffeur you up the hill, past bubblegum pink clapboard houses, until it takes a right at the yellow chapel. On Chapel Street, the island greets you with scents of Bahamian hibiscus, wild fig, tamarind, pigeon plum, sea grape, and a very strange fruit growing on a wide-leafed plant that, you find out later, is called a Thatch Screwpine. Along the way, you’ll likely encounter a hen and her chicks. The breeze is warm. Your legs are sticky with salt spray. You’ve arrived at Coral Sands.
Coral Sands was founded in 1968 — the lovechild of former Hollywood actor and fighter pilot Brett King and his wife Sharon. In Hollywood, in the 40s and 50s, Brett was an extra in over 300 films and television shows, including some of the finest Westerns of his day. Best known for his lone lead role, “Jesse James vs. the Daltons,” and his appearance on “The Green Hornet,” King was a celluloid hero alongside John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, before swapping the glitter of showbiz for the quiet bliss of the Bahamas — finding solace in the laid-back spirit of Briland and the warm-to-touch coral sands.
"Old movie stars don't fade away. They slip off to little known islands and run hotels." — Horace Sutton for The Gazette, 1978
Past the infinity pool and the beach club — the sound of laughter and clinking bottles of Kalik — down the meandering paths of vining succulents, the famed coral sands await you. The sands origins are stuff of legend or science or both — either the microscopic shells of coral-dwelling Foraminifera, or the fallout of a battle between sky and sea spirits — and they are as surreal as you imagine them to be. One thing’s for sure: Time slows down. Bliss takes over. You have arrived.
