• One of the Caribbean’s top luxury hotels on an exclusive private island - with a colourful past.
• Luxurious, distinctive rooms and suites.
• A 3-course gastronomic dinner is included at The Veranda restaurant.
• Cotton House Bay Spa for the ultimate relaxing treatments.
The Whole Story
Like most islands in the Caribbean, Mustique in the Grenadines was once a sugar plantation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sugar was the new commodity and its cultivation could yield vast profits, For the colonial powers, the Caribbean was well suited to growing sugar cane because there was plenty of land and sun, not to mention an indigenous population, the Caribs, whom they could conveniently enslave on the grounds that they were cannibals. When the native population was exhausted, boatloads of slaves were brought from Africa to continue the backbreaking work, But in time, with the shift of large-scale sugar cane cultivation to Asia, the West Indies became less competitive and the plantations, including that of Mustique, were abandoned, Today its restored remains, including the windmill and warehouse, form the core of the Cotton House hotel.
So why, you may ask, is it called the Cotton House? The story behind the name is, in a sense, the story of modern Mustique, This three-square-mile island just south of St Vincent was by the fifties just an abandoned bit of sunburned scrub inhabited by the odd fisherman and his family, And so it might have remained if a young Cohn Tennant, a.k.a. Lord Glenconner, had not adopted it. The scion of a wealthy aristocratic family from Scotland, he had set out for the West Indies to inspect long-forgotten family holdings. While in St Lucia, he heard about an island that was for sale and immediately took the first mail boat out to see it. Despite its craggy, unkempt appearance his imagination was fired and he promptly cabled his father to advise him of his plan to buy. His father replied that he was 'in full accordance providing there is water. There wasn't, but that didn't stop the young lord from paying £45,000 sterling (a small fortune in 1959) for an island without buildings, services or water.
Fuelled by enthusiasm Tennant set about making the island habitable. His first grand plan was to convert the ruins of the sugar plantation into a working cotton plantation. Against great odds (and at enormous expense) he managed to bring in a crop, but only one: he was forced to stop when his accountants calculated that every shirt woven from his fine cotton had cost £3,000. Undaunted, Tennant turned his manic drive and extravagant imagination to a more sybaritic goal – that of turning Mustique into an earthly paradise for family and friends.
In those days nobody had heard of Mustique. Awareness of the island was given a boost when Tennant gave Princess Margaret (a distant relative) a parcel of land as a wedding present. There were no roads to speak of at that time, nor even electricity until 1972. Yet the newly formed Mustique Company pressed ahead with creating a hotel to house guests invited to the island to consider buying land.
The imposing storage house with its foot-thick stone walls and typical veranda became the dining room, the ballroom, and the popular Monkey Bar, In true colonial style, the 'rough and ready' was set aside at night, when guests would dress for dinner and be entertained by some sort of show that the irrepressible Tennant had managed to conjure. Attracted by Mustique's promise of privacy, ideal weather and perfect beaches, as well as the advantage of being out of the hurricane zone, many big names signed on the dotted line. Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Tommy Hager are among those who were approved (while the Aga Khan and the Shah of Iran were apparently rejected).
Cotton House is a collection of houses dotted around a lush estate, each with a view, and guests are accommodated in a house of their own. It has the best location on this man-made Eden, on a promontory that divides windswept L'Ansecoy Bay from the calm green waters the other side, Surfing and snorkelling are therefore both just a stone's throw away.
Despite the stories of wild times and crazy parties, Mustique's present-day appearance - immaculate and unspoilt - is the result of rigorous efforts. No helicopters are allowed on the island and the landing strip accommodates nothing bigger than a six-seater. The airport, like the nearby church, was built in bamboo, and there is no traffic to speak of - everyone gets around on a Mule. This is not quite as rustic as it sounds: Mule is the brand name of Kawasaki's motorized golf carts, These only have two gears (forward and back) but there are still speed bumps all over the island - noise is micro-managed like everything else here. Paradise, it seems, takes relentless planning.
The Rooms
A selection of luxury, distinctive rooms and suites in various restored residences.
Cottages - charming stand alone West Indian-styled individual rooms with garden views and distant Atlantic Ocean views. Bedrooms feature king-size beds, spacious dressing rooms and each room opens onto a large furnished veranda.
Seafront Rooms - luxury King rooms which overlook the Caribbean Sea, all are furnished with woven rattan signature pieces and feature four-poster beds. Some have plunge pools for added relaxation.
Grenadines Suites- all with French doors opening from both the bedroom and the living room onto a large furnished veranda. The two suites on the lower floor feature private plunge pools which flow from the suites veranda with an elegantly furnished pool deck.
Other room types are available.