Sailing into Gustavia

andynap

Senior Insider
Returning to the St Tropez of the Caribbean



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St Barts before the hurricane devastation CREDIT: AP





15 MARCH 2018 • 3:45PM

Sailing into the harbour of Gustavia, the capital of Saint-Barthélmy, aka St Barth’s, in the Lesser Antilles, the first words you see are “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. Emblazoned across the neoclassical portico of the Hôtel de la Collective, seat of the island’s government, the motto of the French republic cannot but raise a smile for rarely does one see more blatant evidence of wealth. And nowhere does the world seem less equal.
In other ports, the 45ft catamaran we had chartered for the afternoon, appropriately named Good Life, might have felt substantial. Here in the St Tropez of the tropics, it was dwarfed by gigayachts: Roman Abramovich’s 536ft Eclipse, with its on-board missile-defence system, the Swedish-Canadian mining magnate Lukas Lundin’s supremely futuristic battleship-grey Savannah, and US retail tycoon Jay Schottenstein’s altogether blingier Just J’s were the standouts among the dozen or so that were anchored there that day.
Earlier that afternoon, we’d moored off the west-coast beach known as Colombier and swam among turtles in the turquoise Caribbean, marvelling that this long stretch of pale sand was still completely undeveloped and more or less deserted, but for a team of staff erecting a pergola in order that a party of picnickers might enjoy lunch in the shade. The only building visible from the water, high on the verdant hill that rises above the shore, is a Modernist beach house that once belonged to David Rockefeller, who along with Edmond de Rothschild, built one of the first vacation homes on the island. It felt pretty close to heaven.






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St Barts "felt pretty close to heaven" before the hurricane hit CREDIT: CHRISTIAN WHEATLEY/CDWHEATLEY


That was last summer. By midnight on September 6, the island had been devastated. Hurricane Irma had lashed the island with 180mph winds, stripping the vegetation of its leaves, tearing roofs from buildings, sucking the water out of swimming pools only to dump it elsewhere and bringing widespread devastation, power failure and flooding. (And mosquitoes – because, one islander told me, there was no longer any air-con to deter them.)
But the clean-up has been swift. Within a day, the airport had reopened, enabling the flights that usually brought holidaymakers to bring in food, tools, tarpaulins and other supplies. David Zipkin, co-founder of Connecticut-based Tradewind Aviation, which operates a fleet of eight-seater Pilatus PC-12 twin props that connect St Barth’s with Antigua (timed to meet with the British Airways flight), Nevis, San Juan in Puerto Rico and St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, mobilised a 30-strong team and packed them off to Costco and Home Depot to buy pallets of bottled water, food, generators and chainsaws.
His airline flew about 60 flights, at its own expense, to the island, using the return legs to evacuate anyone who didn’t need to be there. “It looked like a bomb went off,” Zipkin said at the time. “There were no leaves on the bushes. Some buildings had lost their roofs. But what was amazing is how quick they got it together. They started rebuilding right away.”
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The island's airport reopened within a day of being devastated by Hurricane Irma CREDIT: GETTY


Supplies sent by the French government – the island is, administratively, part of France’s Collectivité d’Outre-Mer – also began to arrive. Within a week Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was there in person to see what was needed.
And by Christmas, astonishingly, the island was ready to welcome tourists again. Shops – practically every major French designer brand has a presence here – had begun to reopen, to cater for the 45 yachts that moored here over the festive season (about a third of the usual number for that time of year). And by March 15, when the fabled Bucket Regatta began, all the best known restaurants – La Guérite, Shellona, L’Orega, Black Ginger, Isola – were up and running again.
Among the first to reopen was the François Plantation, despite it having collapsed in the storm. High above Anse de Flamands on the north coast, the largest and perhaps loveliest of the island’s beaches, it is accessible on foot from Colombier, a 25-minute walk up a steep rocky path and certainly sufficient exertion to justify its excellent pissaladière (think onion tart with olives and anchovies) and Provençal bouillabaisse, two of the highlights on a succinct menu that revels in luxurious ingredients. Even a simple green salad (€39) comes garnished with shaved truffles.
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Practically every major French designer brand has a presence in St Barts


Once an institution on the island, the restaurant had lost its lustre by the time Jocelyne Sibuet, whom Forbes has dubbed the Gallic Martha Stewart and who first came to St Barth’s in the late 1990s, heard it was for sale. “I loved its timeless colonial style and the individual bungalows,” she told me. “It was the very opposite of the resort hotel. A place away from the noise and buzz, a place we could transform both for the celebrities who craved privacy, and for guests who were looking for a home-from-home atmosphere. So it was love at first sight. Un gros coup de coeur total!”
She and her family own 10 hotels and villas in France, most famously Les Fermes de Marie in Megève, La Bastide de Marie in Ménerbes and Villa Marie in Saint-Tropez. St Barth’s was where her core clientele spent their winters. So she bought the François Plantation and set about both reviving the restaurant and reinventing its rooms. In keeping with the names of the rest of the properties in her portfolio she has renamed it Villa Marie (she also has a daughter called Marie), a place practically without precedent on the island not least because its rates start at €350, which by standards is a steal.
It doesn’t have a beach (just a small, pretty pool) and was therefore spared the storm surge and flooding that wrecked so many of the island’s hotels. It too reopened in early March, the first five-star on the island to do so. “We were less affected than other hotels because we are located higher up on a hill,” says Sibuet, “so we only had to deal with the damage from the wind, not the sea. And the lush vegetation has regrown very fast.”
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The Villa Marie Saint Barth


Each of its 18 rooms and suites is its own secluded, solidly built bungalow, most with sea views, tricked out with a riot of exuberant prints (by Diane von Furstenberg and Pierre Frey) and furnished with objets that Sibuet both acquired with the original property (the leather and wood armchairs in the library) and encountered on her travels: brightly coloured furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl chests from Jaipur; grass and porcelain lamps from Tunisia; Peruvian rugs; Rwandan baskets; Javanese sofas; elaborate macramé chandeliers, also from Indonesia, threaded with shells and collars of cowries transformed into conversation pieces. And everywhere you look, carvings of birds and pineapples. The spiky golden fruit is something of a theme.
There’s a small spa that uses products by Pure Altitude, another Sibuet-developed venture (in lieu of a chocolate on your pillow at bedtime, you’ll find sampler sachets of creams to beautify you as you sleep), with two treatment rooms and a compact gym.
But otherwise it’s not a place to spend the day on site. Better to hire a car (convertible Mini Coopers are the marque of choice) and head for one of the island’s superb wild beaches, Gouverneur, for instance, or Saline, which survived more or less unscathed.
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Gouverneur, one of the island's super wild beaches CREDIT: GETTY


Indeed as Fabrice Moizan, the French general manager of Eden Rock on the Baie de St-Jean, the oldest and arguably most celebrated hotel on the island – the one that belongs to Pippa Middleton’s in-laws, after which her husband named his hedge fund – told me that the storm surge actually brought more sand on to the island’s beaches, though swimmers who know them may discern a steeper shelf when wading into the cerulean water.
Eden Rock’s beachfront location suffered catastrophic flooding, and like the rest of the island’s best known hotels – Cheval Blanc, Le Toiny, Le Guanahani et al – it is not expected to reopen until December, when it will unveil a wholesale transformation of its rooms and public areas by the modish designer Martin Brudnizki, his first resort project and his first in the Caribbean, as well as a new restaurant, spa, hairdresser’s and barber, and a much larger boutique.
Details are under wraps, but the signature red livery of yore will be replaced by a subtler palette of corals and greens, and a lot of “statement onyx” is promised.
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Eden Rock's beachfront location suffered catastrophic flooding


Though the hotel itself is currently under construction, the staff do have guests to attend to because about two-thirds of the 115 serviced villas in Eden Rock’s rental pool are up-and-running. Historically their guests have been able to use the hotel’s facilities. To compensate for this, a pop-up beach club has been set up on Lorient, another heavenly stretch of white sand one bay east of Eden Rock.
Here you’ll find the hotel’s distinctive red sunloungers and parasols, a spa cabana offering massages, a bar, beach restaurant and barbecue. It’s hard to imagine a more agreeable spot for lunch of spiny lobster, tuna and mahi mahi, all of which are abundant in these waters. For as Nils Dufau, one of the island government’s four vice-presidents had told me over dinner at François Plantation, there remain 18 families on the island making a living from fishing.
Dufau himself is half-French and half-Swedish, a combination that would seem to qualify him perfectly for a role in the government of this semi-autonomous part of France, where French is the lingua franca, the euro is the currency and, for the moment, your EHIC card works in the well-equipped local hospital, which runs to a state-of-the-art CT scanner, donated by a grateful and clearly generous patient of spectacular means.
At a glance | Locals on how St Barts weathered the storm


But the traditional blue-and-white enamel street signs bear Swedish names as well as French ones – the rue du Général de Gaulle also goes by the name Östra Strandgatan, while the rue de la France doubles as Nygatan – an indication that what he likes to refer to as “the little France of the Americas” hasn’t always been French. In 1784, they ceded it to Sweden in exchange for trading rights and a warehouse in Gothenburg, a decision they came to regret for in 1878 they bought it back.
And so it remains a little piece of France with a tropical climate that gives it the “charme bohème de la vie” that first “seduced” Sibuet. Post-Irma, she says, the island is in some ways even lovelier: the landscape more magnificent and the spirit – in light of the way its people came together for the clean-up – “more beautiful than ever”.
This summer will be a challenge for those who rely on tourism for a living, but for those who fancy a beach holiday, it’s an alluring prospect. The beaches will be empty, and a table overlooking the water at Bonito (my favourite of the island’s restaurants) or Maya’s can be yours for the asking.
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Essentials

Claire Wrathall was a guest of Villa Marie (0033 4 57 74 74 74; saint-barth.villamarie.fr), who do rooms from €400 (£354) for a plantation bungalow this summer to €4,500 (£3,990) for a two-bedroom villa with pool at New Year, and Tradewind Aviation (flytradewind.com). Eden Rock Villa Rental (edenrockvillarental.com).
Air France (airfrance.co.uk) flies to St Barths via Paris and Guadeloupe with return fares from £1,050.


 
I think the beach captioned as Gouverneur is not correct, the far side there is much larger/higher & rockier. So it must be ?
 
I think the beach captioned as Gouverneur is not correct, the far side there is much larger/higher & rockier. So it must be ?

I'm with Nancy. I believe the beach in the picture is the one at Anse Marechal and the island is la Tortue, not Ile Coco off of Gouverneur/Saline. The gap before the island is the cut that leads into bay at Grand cul de Sac.
 
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