The Caribbean's most luxurious spa

The original Sandy Lane was the classic recipe for the perfect hotel--one person, Ronald Tree, hosting his soigné friends. Tree, a scion of the Marshall Field family, fell in love with Barbados after World War II, and his residence, Heron Bay, became a magnet for '50s high society. He then persuaded his rich friends to invest in a hotel that would have the same ethos. In 1961 Sandy Lane was born, and everyone who was anyone came to stay. Aristotle Onassis was rowed in from his yacht while Maria Callas swam alongside, pet marmoset on her back. Babe Paley and Kitty Carlisle Hart, who were staying with neighbor Claudette Colbert, dropped in for lunch. Greta Garbo checked in as Harriet Brown (her nom de voyage) and had the boutique make her a pair of baggy Bermudas. David Niven dreamed up cocktails at the bar, and Elton John once adhered to the New Year's Eve black-tie rule by wearing a bow tie as a garter.

Today the resort is about private-jet cocooning--more about seclusion (with the family, if my visit is any indication) than glamour. Sandy Lane II caters to the off-duty plutocrat who wants the world without kept at bay and the world within at his beck and call. The guest rooms provide the luxury of space (the smallest is 779 square feet) and push-button control. Lights up, lights down; sheers open, sheers closed; ceiling fan on, ceiling fan off; volume up, volume down; music on the terrace, the bathroom, the bedroom--it's all done from touch pads on the night table and beside the doorways. The TV is a wall-mounted, 42-inch flat-screen plasma, and the stall shower has four modes, two heads, six body jets, and a foot faucet. Closets are designed for the person who likes clothes and shoes and comes for a long stay. Outside, the beach is finely ground (and smoothed each evening with a Zamboni), and the sea is a pussycat. Did I mention that the bar Champagne is Bollinger?

When Sandy Lane II opened, it was just this marbled-womb-away-from-home feeling that seemed to put off journalists, who huffed about the rates (then they started at $1,000 a night; now they start at $800, which at this level is par for the course) and the money spent redoing the hotel. Left unsaid was that Desmond, for all his preemptory style, had created a hotel whose own vibe--low-key, restrained, quite classical, in the words of Thompson--is the antithesis.

Happy Ward, the architect of the original Sandy Lane, said that when he designed the hotel, "I put myself in the position of a well-educated English gentleman of the late 18th century going to the West Indies to build a great house." Sandy Lane II, being a replica, proposes the same fantasy. The library has mahogany bookshelves and that centuries-old symbol of the worldly gentleman, a large globe. The lines of the public-room furniture are fine, contoured, and curving. Stripes and windowpane patterns are rampant (but on their best behavior), and the scroll and acanthus leaf is practically the house escutcheon.

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The room decor shows off Thompson's pitch-perfect ear for understatement. In the Luxury Ocean Rooms and the Dolphin Suites, she handles the layout with particular aplomb. Here the architecture unfolds gracefully and deliberately--foyer, hall, bedroom, terrace, sea view (framed by Tuscan columns)--like an antique spyglass. The mahogany furniture uses the 18th-century vocabulary as if it were a native tongue, the ceilings are garnished with cornices, and the doorjambs are made of coral stone, an aristocratic flourish I've never before seen in a Caribbean resort. Seventy percent of the guest- and public-room furniture is custom-made, which is almost unheard-of, says Thompson. The one tropical flourish is the cushions on the scroll-back chairs and make-up benches in the guest rooms, done in soft coral pink. Otherwise, Sandy Lane's rooms are a harmony of white, gilt, and mahogany, planter society's gang colors.

Sandy Lane works hard to choreograph surprises out of a stay. It's about calm, not caprice, and the staff know their parts. Which is why my encounter with Yvonne Ons at the spa on my last day, by which time I'd gotten with the program, was so memorable. Brought up in Holland by a father from Hong Kong and a mother from Surinam, she is a gifted (this is admittedly based on two hours' knowledge) holistic healer.

"You seem to have dry skin," she said disarmingly as we sat discussing what we could substitute for the Ayurvedic treatment, which she didn't recommend because it would cover much of the same ground I had already traversed. (I was impressed that she had looked at my schedule of spa treatments.) And then, out of left field but asked in a completely professional manner, came this: "How many times a day do you move your bowels?"

She had somehow pegged me as a person with digestive disorders--confirmed during reflexology--and from then on, I was in her hands. In addition to the foot treatment, we decided on a scalp massage and ear candling, and along the way I received a new prescription--Bali Green, a vitamin supplement made from green plants; hydrochloric-acid tablets, which make it easier to digest food; a glass of warm water with lemon before breakfast for cleansing--each time Ons divined that another part of my system was out of whack.

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