The Ocean Club, A Four Seasons Resort

Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P grocery fortune, bought an island across the harbour from Nassau in 1959. Hog Island became Paradise Island, and on its north shore Hartford opened The Ocean Club, a small resort of low white buildings facing a beach of pale sand. The Ocean Club, A Four Seasons Resort, occupies the same site, and the terraced gardens Hartford laid out behind it still climb the slope towards a medieval cloister.

History

Much of the island had belonged to the Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, whose estate there was called Shangri-La. Hartford bought it, built his club on the property and had the island renamed officially in 1962, the year the Ocean Club opened. The venture cost him a large part of his inheritance, and in the 1960s he sold his interests on the island to the company that became Resorts International, which built the casino and the larger hotels further west.

In 1994 Sol Kerzner's Sun International bought the Paradise Island resorts, the Ocean Club among them. Kerzner turned the old Paradise Island hotels into Atlantis and kept the Ocean Club as the quiet house of the island, restored and enlarged, and in 2002 it took the name One&Only Ocean Club when he launched that brand. Four Seasons later took over the management, and the resort adopted its present name. Film audiences know the place from Casino Royale, released in 2006, in which Daniel Craig's James Bond arrives at the Ocean Club in the Bahamas; those scenes were shot at the resort.

Architecture and design

The Versailles Gardens are Hartford's monument. They rise in a series of terraces behind the hotel, with clipped hedges, fountains, pools and bronze and marble statuary set along a central axis. At the top stands the cloister, built by Augustinian monks in France in the Middle Ages. William Randolph Hearst bought it in the 1920s and had it shipped to the United States in pieces, where the stones stayed in storage. Hartford acquired them and had the cloister reassembled on the ridge above his gardens, looking over the sea on one side and Nassau Harbour on the other.

The hotel buildings are low and colonial in manner, with white walls, shutters and verandas, and they sit among palms close to the sand. The Hartford Wing, the oldest part, faces the beach, and later wings, cottages and villas spread along the shore and into the gardens.

Rooms and suites

Rooms and suites are set in the wings along the beach, with cottages and villas in the gardens behind, several with their own pools. Most rooms open onto a balcony or terrace towards the sea. The resort is small by the standards of Paradise Island, and a good part of its appeal is that it feels separate from the crowds of its neighbour.

Dining

Dune, the restaurant of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, stands on a deck above the beach and has been part of the resort since the Kerzner years. Its menu joins his French training and his taste for Asian flavours with Bahamian fish and shellfish. The other restaurants and bars of the resort are spread between the main building, the pool and the beach, and dinner on the terrace of the gardens is a long-standing habit of the house.

Wellness

The spa sits in the gardens, with treatment rooms set as separate villas among the planting. There are pools, tennis courts and a fitness centre, and the beach in front of the hotel is the main attraction for most guests.

Weddings and events

Weddings are often held in the cloister, under its arches at the top of the gardens, with receptions on the terraces below or on the beach. The resort also takes private dinners and small meetings.

Location

The Ocean Club lies on the north shore of Paradise Island, east of Atlantis, and two bridges connect the island with downtown Nassau across the harbour. Lynden Pindling International Airport is on the far side of New Providence, about forty minutes by road depending on traffic. The Ocean Club Golf Course, designed by Tom Weiskopf, occupies the eastern end of the island, with holes along the sea on both shores. Bay Street, the straw market and the colonial buildings of central Nassau are across the bridge, and the casino and water park of Atlantis are close by for those who want them. For a luxury resort on Paradise Island, the setting is unusually private: gardens on one side, open beach on the other.