See How a Renovated Cottage in the Bahamas Is Transformed Into the Ultimate Vacation Home – Architectural Digest

This article originally appeared in the July 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.

While out on an evening stroll during a visit to Lyford Cay, Bahamas, a few summers ago, John Knott and John Fondas scoped out a modest gabled cottage that a friend had suggested they see. The single-story house, near the ocean and painted the cotton-candy Nassau-pink typical of dwellings in this celebrated resort community on the island of New Providence, was surrounded by dense thickets of areca palms and Norfolk pines. A shady terrace in the back overlooked the rolling greens of Lyford Cay's golf course. It was a quiet and magical setting on what seemed like the edge of a jungle, recalls Knott, owner and creative director of the venerable fabric and wallpaper firms Quadrille, China Seas, and Alan Campbell. He and Fondas, Quadrille's marketing director, tiptoed around the vine-covered house, peered through its windows, and decided to buy it on the spotnever even having set foot inside. The landscape and views really did it, explains Knott. We aren't golfersit's purely visual. Somehow, the sea of green brings calm.

The pair soon discovered the house had a pedigree and good bones as well as charm. It was built in the early 1960s by British developer and racehorse aficionado Sir Gerald Glover and his wife in the Caribbean style popularized by Robertson Happy Ward, architect of such legendary escapes as the Cotton Bay Club in nearby Eleuthera, the Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados, and Bunny and Paul Mellon's home at Antigua's Mill Reef Club (which Ward cofounded in the late '40s). Rather ambitiously christened Pytchley Lodge after the village of Pytchley, England, where Glover was a member of the hunt, the cottage was laid out like a Georgian manor house in miniature: A central volume with a hipped roof contains the entrance hall, living room, and terrace, and wings to either side hold a dining room and two bedrooms. It had been altered over the decades, but not irrevocably so; the new owners stepped in to remove incongruous additionsincluding '70s track lighting and a screened porch that blocked their view of the 13th greenand returned the house to its original appearance. When they were done, only concrete walls and floors paved with sandy-color Cuban tiles remained.

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In Lyford Cay, Bahamas, textile impresario John Knott and his partner, John Fondas, worked on their island getaway with designer Andrew Raquet. Fabrics by Alan Campbell and China Seas add vivid accents to the living room; the desk is vintage Armani/Casa.

Though hardly decorating novices, Knott and Fondas brought aboard New York interior designer Andrew Raquet to help them take the next step. Everyone needs a referee, jokes Bahamian-bred Fondas, who owns the Lyford Cay home-furnishings shop Bamboo-Bamboo. Knott and Fondas wanted a departure from their other residencesan antiques-filled apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and an 1839 Greek Revival home in Columbia County, New Yorkand naturally they wanted to dip into the fabric and wallpaper archives of Knott's companies, where they found a few tropical-hued patterns that looked appropriately resorty and befitting a '60s beach cottage, Fondas says.

While respectful of the past, Raquet and his clients felt no compunctions about tweaking certain traditions. The Bahamas are full of blue-and-white rooms, lots of Mark Hampton, Raquet observes. We wanted to do something different. And so they found themselves updating archival prints, recoloring them in sometimes eyebrow-raising palettes, to great effect. In the master bedroom, for instance, Raquet cleverly took an Alan Campbell floral fabric called Potalla, originally produced in muted blues, and had it recast as a wallpaperwith chalk-white flowers and leaves against a vibrant French-blue ground. The reimagined pattern lends the entire room a Matissean insouciance. The designer also reconceived a green Alan Campbell fern-motif fabric in a rich cinnamon-brown for a bolder, more modern look; it now generates a warm glow against woven-straw-covered walls and faux-bamboo screens in the graciously proportioned living room. The wall covering and the screens, Raquet acknowledges, are both classic Billy Baldwin decorating signatures that reflect the traditional side of Lyford Cay, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Stavros Niarchos, and Sean Connery have all been habitus (Connery still is).

The furnishings in the cottage hew to this more old-school style. American antiques from dealers in Hudson, New York, near the pair's country house, mingle with Empire mahogany pieces. And Fondas's collections19th-century shell trees and sailors' valentines, and portrait miniatures dating from the 18th century through the 1920sadd another layer while speaking to the island's storied past.

The result of the trio's witty decorating? A lively little house that's nothing short of a pink paradise, deliciously caught between seas of blue and green.

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See How a Renovated Cottage in the Bahamas Is Transformed Into the Ultimate Vacation Home - Architectural Digest