Mustique - My Fantasy Island

Spend a few days living it up at this exclusive (and expensive) Caribbean hide-away: it’s a dream come true!

TEXT: JILL FERGUS

It is an unusually warm spring day, and I am at the Barbados airport waiting to be called for my flight to Mustique. I strike up a conversation with an attractive blonde woman seated near me, also waiting for the flight. She says her name, and immediately, the couple behind us says, “Elizabeth? Are you Elizabeth from Firefly?” She answers yes, and soon the four of us are chatting away. Turns out, Elizabeth owns a guesthouse called Firefly on Mustique, and the honeymooning couple are staying there for the week. While on the flight, Elizabeth invites me to lunch. I haven’t even landed, and I already have a lunch date! But Mustique is like that: on this small island (in the Grenadine chain, 110 miles west of Barbados), everyone knows each other. Such coziness can be a very good thing or quite bad, depending on how you look at it (and perhaps, how you behave!).

I had wanted to visit Mustique for some time, especially after I had done a telephone interview with a local designer who makes fabulous silk sarongs worn by celebrities like Elizabeth Hurley and Jerry Hall. I already knew it was a very exclusive place. Much of that exclusivity has to do with British entrepreneur Colin Tennant, who purchased the island in 1958. Tennant put Mustique on the society map when he cleverly gave a ten-acre parcel of land to the newly married Princess Margaret, the glamorous sister of England’s Queen Elizabeth II. Once the princess set up camp with her royal entourage, other glitterati followed, and soon the island boasted scores of lavish seaside and hillside villas. Tennant has since move on – the island is owned now by shareholders of the Mustique Company – but the allure continues. Mick Jagger and Tommy Hilfiger own villas and Johnny Depp, Hugh Grant and Pierce Brosnan have been spotted about the island.

When I arrive at the tiny, thatched-roof airport, I am met by a representative from Cotton House, the island’s only full-service hotel and my home for the next few days. Cotton House is located on the grounds of a former sugar plantation and features 19 West Indian-style rooms. After settling into my room – done up with a four-poster bed swathed in muslin netting, cane furnishings and stone floors – I take a dip in my private plunge pool overlooking the Caribbean Sea and the neighboring island of Bequia. As I sip a local Hairoun beer and watch the sunset from the pool, I know I have found my own Fantasy Island.

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