How to Score Your Own Caribbean Beach House

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Photo by: Matt Dutile

Finding a big, beautiful Caribbean beach: easy. Finding a big, beautiful Caribbean beach that you can have (or at least feel as if you can have) all to yourself: Well, that’s not quite as easy. Over the past few months I’ve been shooting in the Bahamas, Aruba, Bermuda and other island locales — places with no shortage of sugary strands. And I’ve noticed that while you can easily find a small cove for some solitary sun-worshipping, it’s a whole lot harder to find a place of your own along those expansive sweeps of sand that really define (for me, at least) what a Caribbean beach is all about.

More often than not, I find myself at resorts where the beach, albeit magnificent, is lined with seemingly endless rows of blue-and-white-striped beach chairs and a procession of beach umbrellas stippling the sand like freckles. Call me selfish, but having to share the shore with so many other like-minded, oiled-up sun-seekers makes the whole experience somehow less appealing.

So my recent stay at the Beach House on Providenciales’ marquee strip, Grace Bay, was a refreshing departure from the norm. Opened in October, the hotel is tucked into the quieter and less-developed western end of the bay’s velvety 12-mile stretch. It’s near enough to all the mid-beach action to be convenient, yet far enough away from the concentration of hulking high-rise condo resorts that border the shoreline to feel a blissful world apart. Which meant that I could enjoy the uncommon luxury of feeling as if I had my very own piece of realty along a strand that is, in fact, the island’s most populated. That striated swath of turquoise painting the horizon felt like it belonged to me. The teeming coral reef that stretched for two miles and lay only eight feet below the surface? Mine. The crystalline grains of sand that dusted my toes and sparkled in the noonday sun? Yep, all mine.

The Beach House lives up to its boutique promise with only 21 massive one- and two-bedroom suites, all with whimsical names (I stayed in Cherish) instead of numbers — presumably to promote the illusion of being a guest at someone’s home rather than at a hotel. Which is exactly how I felt when staff would greet me by name and smile warmly as I wandered about the compact grounds: like more of a houseguest than a visitor. Each evening at dinner (artful presentations of lobster, prawns, monkfish, grouper and snapper I’d be hard-pressed to find back home), I listened as staff chatted it up with other guests. They knew their names and their stories. And when they asked how a guest’s day was, they genuinely seemed to care about the answer. It was this sincerity that really made me feel at home here.

That and waking up each morning to the sight of “my” secluded stretch of beach on one of the Turks and Caicos’ finest. beachhousetci.com