If you've ever imagined a small inn set in a garden on a quiet, sun-drenched island, this is it. With wooden floors, wallpaper and four-poster beds, the two-story 1840 home feels like Grandma's house, breathing an air of simpler times when graceful living was an attainable goal.
Named for the island's signature turk's head cactus, Turk's Head Inn gained quiet notoriety under the ownership of a French ex-pat, artist Xavier (X) Tonneau in the 1980s and '90s. The reasons were simple: The house was gracious, the food was good, the bar filled up with local characters nightly, and the front porch was made for doing absolutely nothing. One of those local characters will be doing nothing at Turk's Head eternally: British journalist-cum-barfly John Houseman liked the spot so much he asked X to bury his ashes in the garden.
Across Front Street - a narrow spit of pavement rimming Cockburn Town's waterfront - a wide-screen vista of ever-changing light plays across the turquoise shallows. A few hundred yards out, a cobalt band marks where the bottom plunges sheer into the mile-deep Turks Island Passage. In spring and fall, humpback whales glide by on their way to and from their calving grounds on the Silver Banks north of Hispaniola. In the harbor, lighters over from Haiti way trade for Turks Islands fish. Almost nothing moves faster than the sun's imperceptible trek across the sky.
These days the Turk's Head is run by veteran innkeepers Edward Clotworthy and Alan Tatham, who bought it from X, sight unseen, in 1997. Fresh from a noted luxury inn in the English countryside, they threatened a thorough renovation. Some of the Turk's Head's widespread fans were afraid the place would be tarted up with gingham throws and doilies.
Thankfully, the new owners concentrated their efforts on subduing the inn's notoriously rebellious plumbing and managed to upgrade the decor without effacing its essential character and without running off any of the characters who contribute to it. Divers still make the leisurely stroll across Front Street to be plucked from the beach by skiffs bound for some of the hemisphere's finest inshore diving. Errant roosters wander up to eye guests reposing on the bougainvillea-draped porch. The songs of the humpbacks still echo on the coral ramparts offshore. And in the garden, the late Mr. Houseman, MBE, serenely contemplates eternity from beneath a half-keg of the John Courage ale he revered so much.
Turks Head Inn, Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos: 649-946-2466
Posted online 01/01/99.
