An Island Apart

One day in 1990, Tim Thuell, who at the time was managing a private club in Bermuda, received a call from a friend, a Bermudan hotelier named David Dodwell. Dodwell had just acquired a property on an island “so remote, so removed,” he told Thuell, half in jest, “that you’d never want to go there.” The inn sat on the spacious grounds of a onetime sugar plantation on the breezy Atlantic shore of a drowsy, all-but-forgotten former British colony in the West Indies, an island called Nevis.

Thuell took the bait, he tells me in his office at Nisbet Plantation, near a stone great house built in 1778, and shortly after arriving to investigate, he and his wife, Tina, did what many a visitor does: “We fell in love with it, right off.” Nevis (pronounced nee-vis) makes a seductive first impression. A round, compact island centered around a 3,200-foot dormant volcano that condenses enough moisture out of the trade winds to cloak