The Cloister at Sea Island

Howard Coffin, an engineer who had helped found the Hudson Motor Car Company in Detroit, bought a strip of sand and marsh off the Georgia coast in the 1920s and renamed it Sea Island. In 1928 he opened a small Mediterranean-style inn there, The Cloister, to designs by Addison Mizner, the architect of Palm Beach. The building that guests know now is a reconstruction on the same site, finished in 2006, and the resort has grown around it to take in a beach club, three golf courses and a second hotel on neighbouring St. Simons Island.

History

Coffin brought his young cousin, Alfred W. Jones, into the venture, and Jones went on to lead the Sea Island Company for decades. His family ran the resort for three generations. The Cloister became a Southern institution, a place for honeymoons, for family holidays handed down through the generations and for long summers by the sea. George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush spent their honeymoon there in January 1945. In 2003 the original Mizner building was taken down, and a new Cloister, larger but built in the same Spanish and Mediterranean manner, opened in 2006. The cost of the rebuilding and the property crash that followed pushed the Sea Island Company into bankruptcy in 2010. A group of investors including the Anschutz Corporation of Denver bought the resort that year, and Anschutz became its sole owner in 2016.

Architecture and design

Mizner's original was a modest building of stucco walls, tile roofs and cloistered courtyards, which gave the hotel its name. The reconstruction kept that vocabulary on a much larger footprint: pale stucco, terracotta roofs, arched loggias, ironwork, fountains and courtyards planted with palms and live oaks. The hotel sits beside the Black Banks River, with the salt marshes of Glynn County on one side and the Atlantic beach a little way to the east. The design follows the spirit of Mizner's building rather than copying it, and the new Cloister reads as an old house that has been added to over time.

Rooms and suites

Rooms are in the main Cloister building and in newer buildings closer to the beach, where rooms and suites face the ocean directly. Those in the main building look over the river, the marsh or the courtyards. The Lodge at Sea Island, a separate hotel on St. Simons Island beside the golf courses, belongs to the same resort, as do cottages and houses that can be rented on the island.

Dining

The Georgian Room is the formal dining room of the Cloister. Tavola serves Italian food, the Beach Club has tables by the ocean, and the River Bar looks over the water at sunset. Georgia shrimp, Lowcountry cooking and produce from the farms of the coastal South appear on most menus.

Wellness

The Spa at Sea Island has its own building beside the Cloister, with treatment rooms and a fitness centre. Golf is the other draw. The Seaside course, first laid out in 1929 by the English architects Harry Colt and Charles Alison and reworked since, lies across the causeway on St. Simons Island, and the PGA Tour event now called the RSM Classic has been played at Sea Island every autumn since 2010. Tennis, sailing, shooting and riding fill out the programme.

Weddings and events

Sea Island has long been one of the classic wedding settings of the South, and both the Cloister and the Beach Club host ceremonies and receptions, by the ocean or in ballrooms. The resort also takes conferences and corporate retreats. In 2004 it hosted the G8 summit, which brought heads of government and their delegations to the island.

Location

Sea Island is one of Georgia's Golden Isles, reached by a causeway from St. Simons Island. Jacksonville International Airport is about an hour and a quarter to the south by car. Brunswick Golden Isles Airport is closer, and McKinnon St. Simons Island Airport takes private aircraft. Most of the island is given over to private houses, and access is controlled, so the five miles of beach stay quiet. For a luxury resort on Sea Island there is, in practice, only one address, and it has been here since 1928.