Early in our journey to create our luxury villa we had to come up with a name. It took much less time than you can imagine.
Gaia
At the time, Dan was working with a team of high school students in his entrepreneur class. They were developing a hammock made from plastic bottles cleaned up from the ocean. One name being considered was “Gaia’s Hammocks”, an idea found online by Jacky, Dan's wife. It turns out the young entrepreneurs selected the name Coastra for their first place award winning idea at North Carolina DECA’s Career Development Conference. The name was still fresh in our heads when we bought the property.
Gaia is the divine personification of the Earth and the matriarch of all things in existence. Gaia is also considered the actual Life Force of the Earth whose essence keeps it alive. She's often referred to as the Earth goddess. In modern times, some earth scientists use the term "Gaia" to mean the complete living planet itself, as a complex organism. In fact, many institutes and scientific centers around Greece are named after Gaia in honor of this tie to the earth.
Pearl
The Bakers wanted to project the idea of a jewel untouched by human hands; a shiny piece of work unlike any other.
A natural pearl forms when an irritant works its way into a particular species of oyster, mussel, or clam. As a defense mechanism, the mollusk secretes a fluid to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating is deposited on the irritant until a lustrous pearl is formed. When you consider the growth of the mollusk and the time it takes to coat the “irritant”, it may take as many as six years for the pearl to reach its full size.
A pearl is refined, luxurious, takes time to nurture, and is the essence of earth in its purest form. The same can be said of Gaia’s Pearl. Your experience was more than two years in the making and several years of dreaming prior. May you enjoy the results as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you.
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