Slaves to fashion | St Barths is heating up

Eden Rock, St Barths

I guess I’d never experienced the horrors of a real First World Problem until I came to St Barths. On my fourth night on this high-end speck in the Caribbean, having grown a little jaded of the non-stop luxury and fine dining at a succession of five-star resorts, on St Barths – a little piece of France in the Caribbean – I ventured out to a promising-looking strip of shops to get myself a picnic dinner. One packet of spaghetti, one jar of stir-in sauce, one bottle of fizz and one bottle of violet soda (seemingly unique to this island) set me back well over one hundred Euro. I felt the cost in every mouthful and decided I’d have been better off going down to dinner at Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Though slightly alarming to experience, this landing is entrancing to watch

I flew in from Antigua, aboard an eight-seat Tradewind Aviation plane that bounced its way across the water for forty minutes like a skimmed stone. Uniquely, it’s the only flight I’ve ever been on that took off ahead of schedule. Swift to take off and swift to get there, it concludes with a startling vertiginous drop down a mountainface. Though slightly alarming to experience, this landing is entrancing to watch: from the top of Eden Rock, you see each plane wobble through the mountain pass and screech to a halt on what must be one of the world’s shortest runways; at its end, where it yields to sea, a rather flimsy line of buoys holds back the tourists crowding around to take snaps of the plane sharply decelerating, nosecone pointing right down the camera lens.

The best place to try and get the perfect snap from a safe distance is also the pinnacle, quite literally, of accommodation on the island. Owned by the Oetker family, who took possession after an internecine to-and-fro among moneyed families and hoteliers that forms the basis for much island intrigue, Eden Rock is a Tracey Island fantasia at whose peak is its Howard Hughes Loft. A huge space finished in riveted copper panels and great curved panels of dark wood, with all kinds of aeronautical trappings and gewgaws around the place, it’s somewhat like Jules Verne’s Nautilus has run aground at the top of Fitzgerald’s diamond as big as the Ritz. A series of sundecks allows 360-degree views of the island and the bay; as a sunbather forever watching with trepidation for the sun to go behind a treeline or over a hill, this was paradisal for me: as soon as shade fell on me, I decamped to a lounger with a different aspect. (You can employ the deeply polished wood of the suite as a sort of Pantone colour chart to measure your tan against.) From one sundeck you can watch those planes drop in over the mountain pass; from another you can look down on the grimly determined funseekers of Nikki Beach. Descend the rock, and there’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant, where you can eat lobster prepared in any number of different ways; beneath you, the floodlit bay waters gently sway and the eyes of tarpon fish, eight feet-long giants mooring themselves in the warm shallows, glint like topazes.

Oetker is just one of the dynasties with properties here. LVMH owns Le Cheval Blanc, a hotel and day club whose sandy beach is almost invisible due to the close proximity in which loungers are grouped. It’s not a relaxing vibe: over the top of my book, I watched an very stylish woman in taupe shift dress and panama hat pick her way between beds to announce herself to some strangers: “I saw your hat and just had to ask if it came from the same milliner as mine did!” Without much prompting, she rattled off a resumé: “Well, I’m from Savannah, Georgia, but I’m married to a Jewish New Yorker…” I sank back behind my book. This is a place to see, be seen, gossip about who you just saw, and perhaps do a bit of networking. Oh, and be smoked at by corpulent holidaymakers whose “Smoke Yourself Thin” beach-body workout plan is not conspicuously working (but who are probably rich enough not to care). Every so often someone levers herself off a lounger, plods down to the sea, wades far enough out to ensure her jewellery doesn’t get wet, then returns refreshed.

Every so often someone levers herself off a lounger, plods down to the sea, wades far enough out to ensure her jewellery doesn’t get wet, then returns refreshed

Slightly lower-key, each of the little tropical bungalows at Le Guanahani is painted in sorbet colours, and the interiors are finished with cute design details that take inspiration from a quasi-imaginary heyday of international travel, all leather travelling chests and panama hats. It’s a compact resort, but clever landscaping means that each villa feels nicely isolated from the others; only during a rainy breakfast time, when the restaurant proves a little too compact to accommodate the entire complement of guests descending at once, do you realise the scale of the place. As if to remind you of the pace of life here, there was a tortoise ambling along the front steps as I arrived, though I’m not convinced the staff didn’t set the little critter down there as a photo-op just before my taxi turned into the driveway.

For such is the unreality of this place that a little nip and tuck has been made to the stories told about it. “The unique thing about this particular Caribbean island,” I’m told on more than one occasion, “is that there was never any slavery here.” We-e-e-ell… yes and no. But mostly no. This is a place where not just luxury hoteliers but a handful of “ruling families” have been in charge for a long time; there is zero income tax, but you’d be hard pushed to manage to move here unless you’re French. Technically a farflung “overseas collectivity” administered by the country, St Barths is unmistakably a chip off the old bloc; with every hotel and restaurant staffed by the most implausibly young, slender and beautiful of French gap-year youth (it’s enough to make you refuse the offer of a “Chocolate Fa’mousse” to conclude your dinner at Le Cheval Blanc), the place is also permeated by that enjoyably exasperating French style of service which means that if you are not ready to order your dinner, say, or to inspect the property at the precise instant the staff needs you to be, you are greeted with an open eye-roll of entente not-that-cordiale. Fortunately, the whole place has such an otherworldly air to it that it’s easy to shrug off what seems a stagey brusqueness. And, as I tend to do in France, I revved myself up to converse in French with a lunch waiter only to end up ordering “le club sandwich”.

Amid the super-yachts and deluxe hotels, there is one lone dive bar, Le Select, which seems suspiciously authentic in its grittiness, such that you think the whole thing might, come midnight, revolve on its axis and be revealed as yet another five-star luxury hotel bar. You might pop in there for an “authentic” drink on your way up a steep hill to dinner at Le Bonito, which has excellent lobster risotto, mahi-mahi and mango salsa, plus a terrifically indiscreet Venezuelan owner who explodes a few myths about the island. Given that it’s not exactly the most ethnically diverse place, I’m so astounded to hear him talk about a Portuguese town on the island that I think I’ve misheard. “Well, they work the menial jobs,” comes the explanation. For all I see of anyone who isn’t generically young, slim, blond and gamine here, they might have perfected the invisibility ray.

Ah, but here come the Brits to balance things out a bit. As I’m queuing for my boat at the relatively touristy port at Gustavia, you can see boatload upon boatload of British cruise-ship passengers disembark and blunder out into the sunlight. Tugging down caps and slathering their pasty calves in Factor 50, they look around with the sour expressions of people who’ve misbooked and were expecting to dock at Scarborough. “How long till we can get back on the boat?” they ask one another. “Two and half hours,” someone reports miserably. They sigh and shuffle forwards, flouncing capacious t-shirts out to conceal their moneybelts. “Well, I suppose we’ll just go to the beach and make the best of it.” C

ChevalBlanc.com
EdenRockHotel.com
LeGuanahani.com