The northern tip of the island will feature homes designed by London’s Studio RHE, and a world-class golf course crafted by the dynamic duo of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw

Nestled within a triangle that connects Martinique, Saint Vincent, and Barbados, Saint Lucia is a small mountainous island that faces the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Caribbean Sea on the other. But that’s just Saint Lucia’s geography. To understand what it feels like to be on the island—to watch a black frigate bird cut through turquoise sky beneath puffy white clouds, to sip on Piton (the native pilsner beer), to witness what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott poetically called “the theater of the sea”—one must experience Saint Lucia. And while tourists have traditionally flocked to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, or the Dominican Republic, Saint Lucia has remained overlooked. But that may not be the case for much longer.

Much of the recent optimism for Saint Lucia is a new development on the island’s northern tip. It’s there that a world-class golf course will be bordered by some 300 homes designed by award-winning architect Richard Evans of Studio RHE. The team responsible for this project is Cabot—a brand that, in the short span of 17 years, has produced some of the world’s best golf resorts in the world’s most dramatic settings. “I can’t think of one place on Earth quite like this,” says Ben Cowan-Dewar, co -founder and CEO of Cabot. “And while people say that about most places they go, I truly do mean it.” 

It’s hard to argue with Cowan-Dewar when you consider that Saint Lucia has rows of cactus on the shoreline with a rain forest in the near distance; a holocene within a holocene. Cowan-Dewar and his team have a track record of searching for destinations that are as remote as they are stunningly beautiful, and then building the best golf course within a plane ride of the competition. But it’s not just about hitting the links, Cabot understands the importance of serving the local communities in which they operate. Along with philanthropic efforts, the increased employment and tourism opportunities created by Cabot help grow the surrounding economy. As was the case with their Cabot Cape Breton resort in Inverness, Nova Scotia, an area that was hard hit after its coal mines closed.

But that was in the past; Cowan-Dewar’s team is thinking of the future. And with this project, the future is looking bright. “Unlike almost every other island in the area, there’s been no significant development in Saint Lucia,” says Kristine Thompson, a native of Trinidad and CEO of Cabot Saint Lucia. “And when you build something like we’re working on here, the whole country takes off. It’s one of those special moments that can transform the whole island and its people. And for someone from the Caribbean, that is exciting, being a part of that.”

Cabot Saint Lucia’s location is paramount, both in terms of weather and real estate. High temperatures on the island average in the mid-’80s, while the lows are in the mid-’70s. For potential homeowners, this fact makes catastrophic events such as hurricanes occur once every hundred years or so (versus once every decade for those islands farther north such as the Bahamas and Haiti). But that doesn’t mean storms won’t come, and that power outages aren’t a real possibility. But Cabot Saint Lucia is prepared for that. “It will be our standard that there should never be any sort of power failure at any time, period,” explains Thompson. “Let’s say there’s a power outage. This is an island, after all, and there will be storms. We would be prepared with two backup sources in the form of generators and solar power.” (Cabot Saint Lucia is currently in conversation with Tesla to help run the Eco-friendly home energy systems.)

“First and foremost, each of the homes we designed does a remarkable job of blending into the natural environment,” explains Richard Evans. His RHE team had become known for a number of stunning designs around the globe (including the Yacht Club Pool at Porto Montenegro). “We did this by using natural materials—masonry and stone-based work at the bottom and timber for the pavilions at the top—to make it blend into the setting.” In other words, Evans and his team strove to make sure that each home appeared not on the land but of the land. “And with these building materials, we are guaranteed a remarkable aging process for each home. The brass and the wood will all age differently, each material explaining its own story for the homeowner. Architecturally speaking, it’s all quite exciting. We’ve used traditional materials but always adding a modern twist to it. The result is something quite brilliant.”

From an aerial perspective, each lot at Cabot Saint Lucia takes on the shape of fingers pressed down into the landscape. “We wanted it to appear as if a soft hand pressed down onto the landscape, as if it were naturally there all along,” says Ron Krater, land planner on the project. Krater (of Ron Krater Studio) and the team around him have positioned each home to have an uninterrupted view of the ocean. And though the golf course is below, privacy is a primary aspect of the design. “Over the years, we’ve done a lot of studies about privacy in terms of proximity to the course,” explains Evans. “What we ultimately want, and what I think we’ve achieved, is for residents to feel complete ownership over their site.”

To date, the average price per lot sold at Cabot Saint Lucia has been $2.1 million. And buyers are flocking from various points of the globe. “These are some of the most sophisticated buyers in the world,” says George Punoose, Principal at Cabot Saint Lucia. “We want homeowners to come here and relax. It’s not a place where they have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. This is a place where community will be felt and lifelong relationships will be built. People are catching on that buying property here is a great investment, both in terms of lifestyle and family life.” One of those early investors was future Cabot Saint Lucia resident Bill Richardson. “Having my family invested in different countries and island culture was something I’ve wanted for some time. One of the reasons I bought here was to give them incredible memories,” he says.

Island culture and incredible memories indeed. Saint Lucia is a forty-five minute boat ride from Martinique and a short plane ride from South America. “Each of these islands has their own language and culture and style,” says Punoose. “We didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to take advantage of those surrounding islands, so we have an ‘explorers team’ travel with our members to show them different islands the way a local would experience it.”

But it’s not just island exploration that is bringing investors to this plot of land. It’s also the sublime golf course and the well-known team who designed it. According to Golf Digest, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have designed three of the top 100 golf courses in the world (they rank at numbers 11, 14, and 47 on the list). “We’ve always tried to seek out sites that are a natural fit for golf,” says Coore. “We don’t want to make any big alterations on the site—we want to lay the golf quietly on the ground. The result of this is, a course has its own character because it’s of the land it came from.” In the case of Cabot Saint Lucia, that’s coastal land overlooking impossibly blue water. And to make the shots all the more enticing (or infuriating) for golfers is that seven of the greens are located right along the ocean. Drama seems to prevail from hole to hole as golfers hit over coastal inlets with views of the rainforest in the distance, all in the same swing. “Those who play the course will see sights that are totally unique in golf,” explains Crenshaw, a retired professional golfer who won Masters Tournaments in 1984 and 1995. “That was our real task: figuring out a way to somehow match the beauty that’s already on this island.” 

Some believe the Greeks had two meanings for the word utopia: Eutopos meant the good place and utopos stood for the place that could never be. Ben Cowan-Dewar and his talented team at Cabot Saint Lucia have reshaped the Caribbean landscape with the promise that the good place does exist—because they’ve created it.