The Caribbean's most luxurious spa

By Gary Walther

Editor-in-chief

The Oshadi Envelopment sounds like a sly grand-master chess stratagem, and, indeed, it proceeds like one. The beginning is straightforward--an exfoliation with sea salt that looks like yellow rock candy, followed by a shower. The middle is the feint, a body mask of fennel and licorice that leaves you looking distractedly at your green-paste skin (and thinking you've been prepped for an adult initiation ritual). And the coup de grâce comes inevitably and quietly. Loosely wrapped in tinfoil like an ear of corn, I succumb to the nimble fingers of Ronaldo Barroga as he presses his thumb along the line of my jaw and up onto my skull to drain the lymph glands and then massages my scalp in short, brisk bursts, like Cezanne brushstrokes. He also presses my marma points, but by then I'm sound asleep.

Barroga, who is from the Philippines, has come halfway around the world to work at Sandy Lane's spa, and how he got here speaks volumes about the hotel's sense of its prerogative. Dermot Desmond, one of Sandy Lane's owners, had a massage from Barroga at the Four Seasons Kuda Huraa in the Maldives Islands, after which he promptly called his then spa director, Brigitte Laurayne. "No buts," she recalls him saying. "I want him there by the 20th of December, when I arrive." That required a lot of 1 a.m. wooing phone calls by Laurayne, and a bit of last-minute string pulling by Desmond with the British High Commissioner for Barbados: Barroga had landed, but no one had remembered that he needed a visa to enter.

This is the Sandy Lane MO: Spare no expense in the drive to be peerless. Along with four partners, Desmond, a billionaire investor who owns London City Airport and a stake in Manchester United, among other businesses, spent upwards of $280 million to redo the 112-room hotel. It was a jet-setter playground in the '60s but frayed and frowsy by the time the partners, who had been frequent guests, bought the property from Trusthouse Forte in 1996. What began as a six-month refurbishment in 1998 turned into a three-year closing. (The hotel reopened in 2001.) During that time the old building was knocked down and then put back up, right down to the rusticated archways and distinctive roofline-puncturing cornices--but with a level of luxury intended to put Sandy Lane on a par with the world's, not just the Caribbean's, top resorts. "The budget went out the window very early in the project," quips general manager Colm Hannon.

Desmond cherry-picked the world's top hotels and resorts for ideas. Taking a cue from a hotel in Dubai (Sandy Lane won't say which one), he had tunnels dug beneath the buildings for the housekeeping and room-service carts so guests wouldn't see (or hear) them trundling down the halls. He went through mock-up room after mock-up room--"I lost count of how many were done and discarded," says Laurayne--and it shows: Sandy Lane has perhaps the most beautiful and luxurious guest rooms in the Caribbean. Desmond had to be sold on the spa--it wasn't part of the original plan--but when he bought in, he did so in characteristic fashion: "Build the best spa in the Caribbean," he told interior designer Fiona Thompson of Richmond International, which also did the hotel interiors. And halfway through the project, he fired the original consultants and hired E'Spa, considered one of the best in the business, after meeting the president, Susan Harmsworth, in London.

Thompson certainly built the largest spa in the Caribbean, a 47,000-square-foot building with a Las Vegas-y faux waterfall in front that flows into the 7,500-square-foot resort pool. The entryway is an open, columned rotunda in which curling, make-an-entrance staircases descend to the spa level. The 11 treatment rooms, which lie along a dimly lit, gently curving corridor, have their own bathrooms and showers. (They were designed for celebrities, who won't usually put up with using a locker room.) Nine of them have private gardens, and in three of those there are private outdoor hydrotherapy pools. In the public areas, space is used lavishly for effect. The treatment-room corridor ends in a small rotunda that holds three tall creamy white amphorae, and the hydrotherapy pool is part of a faux-grotto stage set, with burly blocks of coral stone cut and dressed to evoke an architectural ruin.

Courtesy of Sandy Lane There’s a cool classicism to the spa architecture and decor. It’s clearly seen in spa’s relax room.

What is striking about the spa is the quiet. Where is everyone? I wondered on my second morning as I lay in the relax room, a soothing spectrum of whites (a scheme borrowed from Les Thermes Marins at the Hotel Hermitage in Monaco), waiting for my therapist. At the beach and pool, it turns out: Only 20 percent of the hotel guests use the spa (up from 11 percent when it opened), and aside from the 4 to 7 p.m. rush hour, you can have the run of the place. In three days I never met another person in the locker room--and the resort was nearly full during my stay.

The relax room and adjoining hydrotherapy pool became my resort within a resort, with its own spa buffet: Crystal Laconium Steam Room, where an amethyst crystal is intended to transfer energy to you (didn't work on me); aromatherapy steam shower; and hydro pool vitality beds, one hidden in a stone niche. My headquarters was a relax bed in the corner of the room. Made of mahogany and one of the most difficult pieces to source, according to Thompson, the beds have thick white pads and voluptuous curves--like a caterpillar doing the limbo. The shape drops your derriere, supports your lower back, raises your legs slightly, and causes you to sort of pool. With running water in the background as my soundtrack, I dropped off to sleep on both days that I holed up here. You know you've slept soundly when it takes a visit to the spa's Ice Cave to drive out the cobwebs.

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