“Anyone can do luxury,” the manager of Playa Grande Beach Club told me over lunch on the terrace. “That just takes money. To be extraordinary, it takes attention to detail.”
That’s a lesson she learned from her boss, money manager Boykin Curry, a principal owner of the Beach Club. And he and his two dozen or so co-owners certainly obsessed over the details. They bought the land in 2004—some 2,000 acres along one of the Caribbean’s loveliest virgin beaches, which they’re using primarily for their own home sites—conceived of the Beach Club as the social hub of their new community and then, after deciding to add a few rooms and make the facilities open to the public, spent nearly two years testing out their mini luxury resort in friends-and-family mode. They finally lifted the curtain and welcomed the first paying guests in November.
The big reveal: an artful collection of nine bungalows and a central
great house, all done up in a beguiling mashup of the colonial, the
contemporary and the simply wondrous. The visual delights are the work
of admired designer Celerie Kemble—also a partner in the venture—who
brought her gimlet eye to the project.
As I settled into my one-bedroom bungalow (as a guest of the resort), in which I could partially see the beach but was more excited by all the lovely things I could see inside my whimsical room, the second thought that came to me was, Celerie Kemble. Her winning style is that distinctive, and she hits all the right notes here. The first thought to enter my mind: sherbet. It’s pretty, a mix of Palm Beach style, flea-market treasures and colorful tiles and distinctive wicker and ironwork by local artisans. It adds up to something very pleasant—all soft and dreamy.
She collaborated with Elric Endersby of New Jersey Barn Company, who
has built homes and barns for bold-faced names in the Hamptons and posh
corners of New Jersey and has spent many years living near the Beach
Club’s site, in the northeastern Dominican Republic—far in distance and
in mind-set from the DR’s megaresorts around Punta Cana. Endersby is
very much into the details: If you run into him at the bar, he’s likely
to show you the notebook in which he’s catalogued all the historic
decorative woodwork he’s seen in the DR for decades. Many of those
sketches were translated into the gingerbread trimmings and transoms
here.
But the owners’ thoughts about the importance of details don’t end
with woodworking. Rather, their conviction is that the details that make
a resort extraordinary can be found in the people who work there. Playa
Grande Beach Club employs nearly 100 people, and the ones who take care
of guests seem to be uniformly friendly and effective. One offered to
take me on a walk to show me his favorite beach, an opportunity I
happily accepted, and another led me on a hike through the rain forest
to a viewing platform that he built.
The details of a place are also found in the people beyond the resort walls (not that it has them—though there is a large, if discreet, security detail), and the Beach Club invested heavily in them, too. The owners, who all intend to have homes there within the next few years, wanted to do more than pay lip service to the law that says all beaches must be public. The last thing they wanted was to be cut off from the local community—especially in a place like Playa Grande, which stretches about one full mile and is a place that looms large in many Dominicans’ histories or aspirations.
The owners’ first order of business was investing $2.6 million to
build cute, colorful bungalows for the beach vendors, restaurants and
surf shops at one end of the beach, near the public parking lot, whose
access they also improved. The hotel staff encourages guests to walk
over for lunch or an afternoon, or even a little further to a second
beach, which is popular with surfers but otherwise deserted, the stuff
of pure Robinson Crusoe fantasy. (They’ve also invested in creating a
foundation that supports local education, cultural initiatives, public
health and the environment.)
That’s a lesson she learned from her boss, money manager Boykin Curry, a principal owner of the Beach Club. And he and his two dozen or so co-owners certainly obsessed over the details. They bought the land in 2004—some 2,000 acres along one of the Caribbean’s loveliest virgin beaches, which they’re using primarily for their own home sites—conceived of the Beach Club as the social hub of their new community and then, after deciding to add a few rooms and make the facilities open to the public, spent nearly two years testing out their mini luxury resort in friends-and-family mode. They finally lifted the curtain and welcomed the first paying guests in November.
The upstairs bar in the great house (photograph by Patrick Cline)
As I settled into my one-bedroom bungalow (as a guest of the resort), in which I could partially see the beach but was more excited by all the lovely things I could see inside my whimsical room, the second thought that came to me was, Celerie Kemble. Her winning style is that distinctive, and she hits all the right notes here. The first thought to enter my mind: sherbet. It’s pretty, a mix of Palm Beach style, flea-market treasures and colorful tiles and distinctive wicker and ironwork by local artisans. It adds up to something very pleasant—all soft and dreamy.
Recommended by Forbes
The exterior of one of the bungalows (photograph by Patrick Cline)
The details of a place are also found in the people beyond the resort walls (not that it has them—though there is a large, if discreet, security detail), and the Beach Club invested heavily in them, too. The owners, who all intend to have homes there within the next few years, wanted to do more than pay lip service to the law that says all beaches must be public. The last thing they wanted was to be cut off from the local community—especially in a place like Playa Grande, which stretches about one full mile and is a place that looms large in many Dominicans’ histories or aspirations.
The stretch of Playa Grande Beach that’s right in front of the hotel (photograph by Stephanie Smith)
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