Inkjetguide: Barbados: Sun

‘For good old-fashioned charm, look no farther than the west coast of Barbados, says Justine Picardie’

Cocktail hour at the Coral Reef Club and the guests have gathered, as is traditional, for a weekly drinks party at the owner's house in the grounds of the hotel. They have left an English winter behind them, but the storm clouds of recession are global and you might expect some indication of that, even here, among the moneyed classes who return every year to the glittering western shore of Barbados, otherwise known as the Platinum Coast. However, the talk is of golf, the weather, of grandchildren and grouse shooting – the genteel conversations that have been had at the Coral Reef Club for more than 50 years, ever since Cynthia and Budge O'Hara first arrived as a young couple, to run the hotel for its English owner, an ex-naval officer.

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There is much about Barbados that has changed since its day as a British colony, but as the gin and tonics clink, you can still see why the island became known as Little England, or Bimshire (the origins of which are obscure). Unlike other Caribbean isles, fought over by a variety of invaders, Barbados was under uninterrupted British control from the first landing of sailors in 1625 until the coming of independence in 1966. There seems to be an even greater concentration of cricket pitches and polo fields here than in the Home Counties, and the place names, like the architecture, are testament to its colonial past (Chancery Lane, Clapham, Hastings, Scarborough). In 1700, a visiting French priest described the prosperous capital, Bridgetown, as "handsome and large, with straight, long streets… the houses are well built in the English taste, with many glazed windows, and magnificently furnished; in a word, it has an air of neatness, politeness and opulence which one does not find in other islands and which it would be difficult to meet with elsewhere."

Opulence has continued to be a hallmark of the west coast, although wealth is now generated by tourism, rather than the sugar plantations. If a rather particular form of Britishness prevails, this is due in part to the influence of two men, Sir Edward Cunard and Ronald Tree, who stamped their identities on Barbados just after the Second World War.

Tree was a Conservative MP who had served in Churchill's War Cabinet, Cunard a scion of the shipping line, with a splendid house overlooking the ocean called Glitter Bay. Tree was sufficiently beguiled by the place after visiting Cunard in January 1946 that he bought a nearby plot of land and built his own house, Heron Bay, in 1947. His architect, Sir Jeffrey Jellico, designed a magnificent coral stone Palladian villa, modelled on the Villa Maser in Italy, and Tree's friends flocked to stay; and with such a degree of enthusiasm that in 1961 Tree opened a hotel, Sandy Lane, just along the beach, on a former sugar estate. The smart set alighted there, and migrated into the palatial villas that replaced former fisherman's shacks (a number of them designed by Oliver Messel, Lord Snowdon's uncle). Mick Jagger rubbed shoulders with Princess Margaret, and Claudette Colbert came every winter to her Georgian plantation house, Bellerive, along with her friend Frank Sinatra and the socialite swans, Babe Paley and Slim Keith.

Some complain that the post-war glamour of the Platinum Coast has gone forever, to be replaced by something more ostentatious, yet less beguiling. And inevitably, there have been changes, even in Little England. Heron Bay is now owned by the Bamford family, who allowed Tony Blair to avail himself of its beachside facilities when he came on holiday to Cliff Richard's villa. Sandy Lane was taken over and rebuilt by an Irish investment syndicate – the same super-rich racing fraternity that has colonised the island with as much alacrity as the first British plantation owners. A new Four Seasons is rising on a vast construction site, south along the coast, while Simon Cowell has introduced the latest breed of British celebrity, filming episodes of The X Factor in his lavish villa. traval you need:http://www.e-batteries.com.au/

Yet in the midst of all the comings and goings, the Coral Reef Club still remains, like a quietly dignified dowager overlooking the hysterical antics of overexcited debutantes. Not that the dowager is in any sense dowdy; if anything, its graceful luxury has increased with the passing decades, with the refurbished sea-view suites among the loveliest you'll find anywhere in the Caribbean (the decorously dark mahogany furniture offset by pristine white linen and crisp cotton prints). The O'Haras bought the hotel from the original owner, and their three children – Patrick, Mark and Karen – have all joined the family business, along with their partners.

A second hotel, The Sandpiper, established by the O'Haras in 1970, has thrived; and despite her husband's death in 1995, Cynthia continues to preside over the Coral Reef Club's weekly cocktail party, and much else besides. Many of the guests speak of her as if she were a favourite member of their family; and indeed, there are some at the cocktail party who have been coming here every winter for the last three or four decades, bringing their children and then their grandchildren in the Christmas and New Year holidays.

Mrs O'Hara is the soul of discretion, but it is no secret that the writers Simon Gray and Harold Pinter were regulars at the Coral Reef Club (Gray worked at his typewriter on the terrace, overlooking the waves); and Agatha Christie was so inspired that she used the hotel as a setting for A Caribbean Mystery, published in 1964.

Miss Marple's holiday was interrupted by the mysterious death of Major Palgrave; naturally, she solved the crime, in an intriguing diversion from her holiday in paradise. Nowadays, guests are more likely to be distracted by a visit to the spa than anything more sinister. This opened less than a year ago, but the coral stone building already looks very much part of the hotel's 12 acres of tropical gardens, surrounded by frangipani and bougainvillea. With interiors by the British designer Helen Green, opening onto a peaceful open-air courtyard, it is the very opposite of a dark basement city spa: bathed in sunlight, but cooled by sea breezes, with shade beneath white awnings and cabanas beside a waterfall and hydrotherapy pool.

Unlike other, more corporate branded hotel spas, the Coral Reef Club has managed to keep a sense of individuality, using top-of-the-range Natura Bisse products alongside local blends of traditional ingredients. The air is filled with the scent of lemongrass – a natural mosquito repellent, as well as a healing essential oil – and you can have a fresh ginger scrub or a ginger tea, or both. There are facials, pummelling massages and soothing skin treatments, all of them administered by expert Barbadian therapists.

Such are the attractions of the Coral Reef Club that there are guests who get no farther than the immaculate sands of its beach, where gentle waves lap the shore, and the razzmatazz of other west coast resorts seem even more distant than the cruise ships that glide along the horizon.

There is more to Barbados than this, of course – the windmills and plantation houses of the interior still stand, evidence of its past, including the era of slavery. It would be a pity to come to the island, and see nothing of its remarkable history, in particular, St Nicholas Abbey. It's one of the last remaining 17th-century houses in the Caribbean, built in 1657, and is now owned by a local architect, Larry Warren, who has restored the Jacobean buildings of this former plantation and the steam engine that grinds sugar cane in its original windmill. On the stairs inside the house stands a grandfather clock that has kept the right time since it was shipped here from London 250 years ago. Outside, there are groves of trees, some of them as old as the house, and ancient garden paths made of bricks brought as ballast by boat when the British first settlers arrived on the island.

The same sense of history – emerging through the fabric of a building and growing out of the ground – is apparent at Fisherpond Great House, at the heart of another former plantation. Built in 1635, it is now the home of John and Rain Chandler, who open to the public for lunch on Sunday (Rain is renowned as one of the best cooks on the island) and by special arrangement at other times. The Chandler family arrived in Barbados in 1638, and John can tell stories about every era of its history – from Sam Lord, the "Regency Rascal" who wrecked boats and kept his wife in a dungeon, to the Thirties, when Noël Coward and Cole Porter arrived with a crowd of Bright Young Things, leaving the Wall Street Crash behind them, and banishing the Great Depression in the light of the Caribbean sun.

Lunch at Fisherpond is served on a long mahogany table, and the talk turns to Anthony Eden's hurricane lamps (bought from Eden's Barbadian retreat, Villa Nova) and to ghosts. Several flit through the house, according to the Chandlers, who talk about them in the same soothing tones as they welcome their living guests. One is a little girl, they say, who drowned in the pond – a gentle spirit, who does nothing more alarming than move glasses on the table. Another is an upright-looking Englishman in a tweed jacket and leather boots, with a handlebar moustache. "He clears his throat just behind me," says John Chandler. As he speaks, the wind blows through the palm trees, knocking the doors and the shutters open, rustling through the fields of sugar cane beyond; and the past is on the wing and in the air, rising up into the high blue sky that seems to go on forever and always.

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Barbados: Sun - sea and G&T

‘For good old-fashioned charm, look no farther than the west coast of Barbados, says Justine Picardie’

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