“You learn to be very patient on this island,” says Henry Rolle, the managing partner of Rock House, a 24-year-old hotel-restaurant near Government Dock on Harbour Island in the Bahamas. In the local patois, Bahamian Creole, the word terreckly, derived from directly, captures the pace of life on Briland, as the long, narrow island off Eleuthera is known. It means good things come to those who wait, and Brilanders—be they Black, Brits or boonies, the winking local pejorative for tourists—take pride in living on Bahamian time. Though the island is changing radically, as Carnet de Voyage noted last spring in Pleasures of the Harbour, its evolution proceeds gracefully—terreckly, one might say.
Rock House
Though the island is serviced by quick flights from south Florida on Tradewind, the luxury puddle-jumper carrier, golf carts are the main mode of local transportation—and enforce a lifestyle downshift with their slow speeds, throttled further by the decrepitude of many of those available for rent, and the unfamiliarity of many American visitors with British-style left side driving. Visitors engaged in real estate voyeurism quickly discover that half of Harbour Island—the northern end known as the Narrows, home to many large villas and estates owned by international nabobs—is effectively off limits.
While that’s supposedly because the roads there are narrow and hazardous, the informal policy also seems designed to protect the privacy of those notables who have, over the years, included Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, the model Elle Macpherson, duty-free mogul Robert Miller and his family, Gap and J Crew boss Mickey Drexler, and Arki Busson, the French financier and father of Macpherson’s two sons, and former fiancé of Uma Thurman, with whom he also shares a daughter; he has also been linked to actresses Catherine Oxenberg, Kristin Scott Thomas, and the late Farrah Fawcett. India Hicks, the ex-model, lifestyle designer and god-daughter of Britain’s King Charles, is the closest Briland has to a public face, in large part due to her role in creating The Landing, another hotel-restaurant, in a restored, 200-year-old Colonial estate house close to Rock House. Hicks later stepped away and it has long been run by her co-founder Tracy Barry, daughter of the very first Miss Bahamas.
Though they are still new by Harbour Island standards, Rock House and The Landing, both in Dunmore Town, the island’s central commercial district, have been around long enough to be considered island landmarks. Older still are Romora Bay, once owned by nightclub legend Regine’s son, and on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island, Pink Sands, once owned by the British music and hotel mogul Chris Blackwell, and Coral Sands, created in the 1960s by an aviator and action-film and TV western actor, Brett King; though now under new ownership, it remains a favorite of old-school American society types.
Lately, Harbour Island has begun to upgrade its rental-villa offerings, seeking to expand beyond its authentic but shabby chic image and compete with better-known islands from Barbados to St. Barth. Dining on grilled local lobster tail beside the swimming pool at Rock House, we learned from Henry Rolle that aside from its ten guest rooms, the hotel now also offers an array of rental properties from cottages to the five-bedroom Sea House, a beachfront luxury villa with a pool that goes for $15,000 a night.
But Briland’s shabby chic lives on. Family-run Tingum Village, on the outskirts of Dunmore Town, boasts rooms for under $200 a night and Ma Ruby’s, one of several Caribbean restaurants that claim to have inspired Jimmy Buffett’s song, Cheeseburger in Paradise (more often associated with Le Select on St. Barth). Though I was promised plentiful lobster when I booked a table, in fact, they were out of season, so I settled for stone crab with peas and rice and a slice of key lime pie. Though the service was slow, the meal proved well worth the wait. Good things come…terreckly.