Sandy Lane, one of Barbados’s leading hotels, celebrated its 30th anniversary last year with a surprising and welcome move: a major renovation that took the resort back to its original Palladian design.
“We were given the opportunity to recreate the hotel as it once was,” says Richard Williams, the hotel’s General Manager, “and we renovated it back to when it was at its best.”
Opened in 1961, Sandy Lane was the brainchild of the late British philanthropist Ronald Tree; he envisaged a small and elegant hotel using the finest materials available. The architect was John “Happy” Ward. “A traveller visiting distant places,” said Ward, “should be pleased and excited by the local atmosphere and architecture. In designing Sandy Lane Hotel, I put myself in the position of a well-educated gentleman of the late 18th century going to the West Indies to build a Great House.”
The renovation reasserted the original architecture and extended it to new areas of the hotel. “Sandy Lane was built with very elegant detail in the design,” says the architect in charge of the renovation, Barbadian Larry Warren. “Our aim was to recapture and extend this style.”