Culture + Lifestyle

Cotton House

The Discreet Charms of Mustique's Exclusive Resort

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The island of Mustique floats like a small jade pendant on the Caribbean necklace known as the northern Grenadines. It is three miles long and half as wide, a diminutive haven of wooded valleys and coral beaches. Europeans dropped anchor there in the first half of the eighteenth century, to cultivate sugarcane in the valleys. At one time Mustique supported seven sugar plantations, but their proprietors abandoned the island when the sugar beet was introduced in Europe. The plantations reverted to jungle, and Mustique drowsed for another hundred years.

In 1959 a Scottish nobleman acquired the island for the unprincely sum of sixty-six thousand dollars. For several years Colin Tennant, now Lord Glenconner, whose forebears had invented powdered bleach and amassed significant holdings in Trinidad, lived a relatively modest existence on Mustique. He took up residence in a small locally built house and grew coconut palms and sea island cotton. On the occasion of the marriage of his friend Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones, however, Tennant fashioned a wedding gift out of ten acres overlooking the electric-blue Caribbean—and several years later, in 1968, he formed the Mustique Company, with the aim of developing the island as a small colony of his peers. He began selling lots and conceived Cotton House, an eight-room hotel comprising several buildings on the grounds of one former sugar plantation.

To design the hotel, Tennant recruited Oliver Messel, an uncle of Armstrong-Jones's who is perhaps better remembered for the costumes and sets he created for the Royal Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Somewhere around this time Mustique's public profile evolved from virtually nonexistent to that of a playground for the so-called jet set—an airstrip was installed in 1969. It may have had something to do with Les Jolies Eaux, the four-bedroom villa that Oliver Messel built for Princess Margaret, who quickly acquired a reputation for her parties there. Or possibly it was the arrival of Mick Jagger, who came to the island in 1972 and who (with Bianca) bought a beach cottage the following year.

Whatever the origins of Mustique's notoriety, its present-day denizens insist the flashy image is overblown. "If people are together in a small remote place without any entertainment, they make their own entertainment," maintains Brian Alexander, a Briton who has served as managing director of the Mustique Company since 1979. "I don't think it was quite as wild as the media made out."

Since its formation by Tennant, the Mustique Company has regulated the island's growth, successfully fending off the sort of commercialism that has spoiled other Caribbean outposts. Electricity and fresh water and a network of roads were introduced without demolishing Mustique's natural resources, and a residential building limit restricts the number of villas on the island to one hundred and twenty. There are now eighty-nine villas, ranging in character from the Indonesian-style domain dreamed up by another English rocker to an American fashion tycoon's recently completed manor, which local critics are calling Versailles. (Confidentiality is now the custom concerning celebrity residents.) Cotton House has also been judiciously developed by the Mustique Company: Its eight rooms have grown to twenty, but the plantation's old barn and sugar mill survive. The soul of the hotel, like that of the island itself, endures.

"For most people Cotton House is the first stop on the island," says Grace Leo-Andrieu, of GLA International, the Paris-based management company that has overseen the resort for the past three years. "It has to be a showcase. Not chichi, but a simple and chic quality operation."

The resort sprawls across thirteen acres of palms and greensward between the blue sweeps of Endeavor Bay in the Caribbean and L'Ansecoy Bay on the Atlantic side. The prevailing architectural mode might be called British Colonial West Indian—a scattering of wood and stone pavilions, almost Georgian in their symmetry, with pitched roofs shading prominent balconies and verandas. The heart of the place is the restored barn, a rambling veranda-wrapped affair called the Great House. One veranda overlooks the sea and serves as the outdoor dining room; another, facing a small lily pond, is known as the cigar veranda. The hub of the Great House is the Great Room, a commodious and comfortable space, with a high beam ceiling, walls of light-coral-painted stone and much evidence of Oliver Messel's flair—a massive shell-encrusted breakfront, a bar shaped like a horseshoe and trimmed with gingerbread.

The set designer's eight original guest rooms have been preserved with their distressed-wood furnishings and eccentrically low doorknobs intact. The twelve newer units are spread around the grounds, each with a view of the gardens, the pool or the ocean. Each features a deep porch and chairs of woven cane and rattan. Each holds four-posters shrouded in mosquito netting and equipped with pillow menus (selections include a maternity pillow, a snore-stopping pillow and a hypoallergenic pillow, packed with 100 percent organically grown buckwheat hulls).

"It's Caribbean speed," offers Oliver Sevestre, the general manager of Cotton House. "We try to show the people that here we don't push, we don't rush, we take our time. Ninety percent of our guests have very stressful lives. It's obvious when they arrive. Especially people from New York. I don't know what kind of lives they have over there, but it takes a good three days for them to relax."

Sevestre's rundown of hotel-hosted events suggests that Caribbean speed still allows for some old-fashioned revelry. "On Tuesday we have the Mustique Company cocktail party," he recites. "We invite everyone on the island, and we meet in the Great Room for drinks. On Wednesday we don't do anything at Cotton House because everyone goes to Basil's Bar that night. There's a live band—Caribbean music, what they call jump-up music—and people eat and drink and talk and dance. Thursday is our management cocktail party, and Friday is our cruise. We take out our catamaran, which holds up to sixteen people, and we have drinks on board, plus snacks, and we sail for about two hours at sunset. On Saturday it's a barbecue on the beach, with lobsters and crabs, and a live band playing. On Sunday we give them a break."

Guests may choose to work off the drinks—and cleanse the pores—at the recently opened mini spa, situated in a little cottage on the beach whose seven doors open to admit the sigh of the surf and views of neighboring Bequia. Or they may hit a beach (there are nine on the island). Or they may lie low at the pool and indulge in the swim-and-eat cycle peculiar to tropical resorts. In order to protect the flamboyant inhabitants of the coral reef, the Mustique Company prohibits fishing within one thousand yards of shore, but a daily catch is brought in by local fishermen and is featured in chef Jean-Jacques Uge's imaginative European-Caribbean fusions (mahimahi infused with coconut milk and wrapped in banana leaves, spiny lobster flambéd in dark rum).

For the more active—"The Americans have to move," says Sevestre—there's the usual complement of water sports: surfing, sailing, snorkeling, scuba diving. Picnics can be packed for visits to the island's various beaches, and a yacht is available for charter trips to Bequia or to the Tobago Cays. There are four tennis courts on Mustique, and riding trails lace the island. Or one can always rent a jeep and snake down the coastal roads.

Les Jolies Eaux was sold not long ago, but Lord Lichfield has moved into Obsidian, a Messel-inspired concoction. Mick Jagger still unwinds at Stargroves, his compound of Japanese pavilions. More often than not, he brings the kids. "Yes, people still enjoy their life here," reports Oliver Sevestre. "We still get the top-of-the-world people, but they just want to be themselves. The people who come here just seek normality."