St Lucia’s west coast is dominated by the Pitons. For the island’s Amerindian natives, they were a sacred site — local fishermen still use the two soaring spikes of greenery-covered volcanic lava to navigate their way home.
The stretch of land facing out into the blazing sapphire sparkle of the Caribbean, with Gros Piton (2,525ft) and Petit Piton (skinnier, and 90ft shorter) rearing to the sky on either side, is the former stomping ground of Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, the Scottish aristocrat who more or less single-handedly invented luxury tourism in the Caribbean, and whose colourful life and friendships were rarely out of the papers.
The sensational headlines continued after his death in 2010, as legal claims flew between London, Scotland and the Caribbean to establish who was going to inherit his estate. It has all been more or less sorted now, between Kent Adonai, his devoted St Lucian manservant, and members of his family, but it’s hard to ascertain the details.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Tennant developed the nearby island of Mustique as an A-list destination: giving his friend Princess Margaret a plot of land for a holiday home in 1960 ensured nonstop PR for decades. He then moved lock, stock and pet elephant to St Lucia in the early 1980s.
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“He told me he first came to this bay in a canoe — there was no road access — and bought the entire valley, Piton to Piton, for a million dollars,” says Roger Myers, the British businessman who now owns a chunk of that prime territory, declared the Val des Pitons Unesco World Heritage Site in 2008.
Myers’s investment has been somewhat more substantial, but then the Caribbean holiday-home experience he’s offering outclasses anything even a Scottish lord and British royalty could have dreamt of in the last century.
On a prime shoreside plot, there’s a chattel house, a charmingly simple square wooden cottage with a tiny terrace looking out to sea: it’s a traditional form of housing all over the Caribbean, and the idea is that you can pick it up and move it. This was the holiday retreat Tennant built for Princess Margaret when he started developing the former Jalousie Plantation, his 488 acres of intra-Piton paradise.
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The royal chattel house sits on the plot marked out for one of the four magnificent beachfront homes that Myers is developing, the latest phase in his Sugar Beach hotel and residences complex. The history is convoluted, but through various ownerships, name changes and upgrades, a 180-acre chunk of the luscious valley Glenconner discovered in the early 1980s is now Myers’s Sugar Beach resort: a luxurious hotel with guest bungalows climbing up the hill from the pristine white beach.
Imported sand covers the less Instagram-friendly grey-black natural volcanic stuff, which must have been a relief for the assorted celebrities — including Ben Affleck and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones — who gathered here to watch Matt Damon and his wife, Luciana Barroso, renew their wedding vows in 2013.
Alongside the hotel, and sharing its five-star services and facilities, including the fabulous treehouse spa, one residential development is nearing completion. Soon, along the next stretch of about-to-be-shimmering sand, they will be joined by the four mega-houses that comprise the Glenconner Collection.
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Even though Myers, 67, is at the helm of this sizeable business, he seems to have found the formula for the perfect-laid back Caribbean lifestyle he’s now selling. “The ultimate luxury in life is never having to wear shoes,” he says (though other luxuries, such as his yacht and his house on the north end of the island, probably help).
He started his career unexcitingly enough, as a chartered accountant in north London, but things got rather more rock’n’roll when he started giving tax advice to the Rolling Stones, even going on tour with them in the 1970s. He says it was Bill Wyman, not the famously financially sensitive Mick Jagger, who wanted to talk money. “He was all over it,” Myers recalls. “The others had other distractions.”
Myers then set up a record label with Tony Visconti, who produced many of David Bowie’s albums, and a concert promotion agency. “Once you’ve done that, nothing in life is hard,” he says. “It was an unmitigated nightmare.”
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The story of James Brown’s manager pulling a gun on him — while he was driving the flamboyant American soul singer up to Wigan to do a gig for which precisely one ticket had been sold — encapsulates the thrills of that era, but Myers’s talents obviously lay elsewhere.
After opening the successful Peppermint Park restaurant in Covent Garden, all American-retro candy colours and fizzing cocktails, he went on to invent an even more lucrative concept: Café Rouge. He expanded the chain to more than 100 restaurants around Britain before becoming a founder director of the pub giant Punch Taverns. Within weeks of selling his shares in the business in 2002, he and his wife, Lee, moved to St Lucia and he “became a layabout”.
The holiday didn’t last. In 2008, he became owner of what was then the Jalousie Plantation Hotel, which was no longer owned by Glenconner, although he would occasionally wander down from his elaborate home, a maharaja’s palace in miniature called the Great House (but known locally as the Taj).
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“He just wanted to come down and find people to talk to,” Myers says. “I think he was a lonely man.” That said, he had “one of the largest funerals St Lucia ever saw”.
“I thought it [the Jalousie] was the most beautiful place in the world,” Myers adds, although the hotel back then was “pretty grim”. Improvement was gradual until the $100m relaunch as Sugar Beach in 2012, run by the upscale Caribbean hotel operator Viceroy: “Its target market is really cool fortysomethings.”
These middle-aged hipsters, if they’re also really rich, might like to upgrade their holiday accommodation to a permanent home by buying one of the Glenconner Collection properties, on land Myers purchased from the aristocrat before he died. The big idea, he explains, is to bring a new dimension to Caribbean luxury.
“A lot of the Caribbean is fat old white blokes like me sitting around moaning and telling each other how much money they’ve got, but we’ve moved on from saying, ‘It’s the best because it’s the most expensive.’”
Instead, Myers is aiming for “something a little bit more modern and stylish”. The designs have a top-drawer pedigree: he worked on them with architects from what he calls the “Lane Pettigrew stable”. Pettigrew designed many luxury homes in the Caribbean, and was Glenconner’s friend and collaborator on Mustique.
The plots are being raised to make the most of the views, but there’s nothing radical about the look of the dignified, traditional two-storey mansions. They have white clapboard walls, infinity pools and generous amounts of traditional gingerbread fretwork around the large shaded balconies and terraces.
Two of the four homes are merely huge: four-bedroom houses with 3,735 sq ft of internal living space and another 1,072 sq ft of external covered space on nearly three-quarters of an acre. The other two are enormous: almost 8,000 sq ft, with five bedrooms (and staff accommodation), and 2,500 sq ft of covered exterior space on about 1.5 acres. While one of them has the chattel house as a historic garden shed, should you want to keep it, another is on the site of Glenconner’s Bang Between the Pitons nightclub, where locals and visiting toffs would drink and limbo-dance the night away.
One of the smaller homes has already been snapped up; the other is available for $6.5m (£4.1m). The big ones are on offer for $14.5m and $16m — including all the custom-made furniture that will make these homes instantly rentable through the hotel.
They should bring in a tidy sum, especially if the owners are prepared to forgo dipping their toes in the Caribbean over the prime Christmas and new-year period. The smaller, but still extremely smart, Sugar Beach Residences have almost all been sold, with the odd resale coming onto the market for about $3m. “Owners are making 7%-9% net [after management charges] if they are careful with their own use,” Myers says.
Inside, the decor is “muted earth tones, with a bit of Glenconner-inspired eastern eclecticism”. The living area is open-plan, but the kitchen can be screened off “when the staff are cooking”, and every detail — from the hardwood floors to the bathrooms to the right kind of wineglasses — has been chosen with stylish luxury in mind.
Up to 300 workmen are involved in creating the development, and building can proceed rapidly after purchase, although work stops during high season.
There’s no prospect at the moment of restoring the Taj — its blue-washed walls, arabesque pillars and squat grey Mogul domes these days have a mournful, neglected air, with birds swooping in and out of the barred window openings, and goats grazing on the scrub at the back. If it came up for sale, Myers would be interested — but what might Glenconner think?
They used to discuss the plans for the residences before he died. “He wanted to call it Glenconner Village,” Myers recalls. “He was a bit of a snob, he wanted the right kind of people.” Indeed, they are probably the only ones who can afford it.
Sugar Beach Residences; 00 1 758 456 8091, sugarbeachresidences.com
More St Lucia property
Soufrière £1.9m
You’ll spend a lot of time drinking in the views of the Pitons and the neighbouring island of St Vincent if you buy Tamarind House, a stone home with a saltwater pool, a tennis court and 8,850 sq ft of indoor and outdoor living space. The main house has three bedrooms, a circular courtyard filled with banana plants and a huge living area with a terrace; there’s also a self-contained cottage and a lodge. 020 7016 3740, savills.com
Gros Islet £945,000
Traditional architecture and sea views to Rodney Bay’s marina and Pigeon Point are the headline attractions at Leela Plantation, a four-bedroom villa with breezy wooden verandas, an open-plan living area and a pool with a barbecue area and covered seating. With a detached one-bedroom guest cottage and a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the grounds, there’s plenty of potential to generate rental income. 020 7016 3740, savills.com
Vieux Fort £514,884
A short drive from Hewanorra airport, on the island’s southern tip, this villa is in a boutique development overlooking Savannes and Honeymoon Bays. With three ensuite bedrooms, a private circular pool and several spots where you can sink a sunset cocktail, it would fetch nearly £300 a night in high season (November-April) if you decided to put it in the development’s rental and management programme. 020 8960 1010, 7thheavenproperties.com