Villa Supersky St Barts

Supersky: Dual Pools in St. Jean

Saint-Barth is a small island, but it is lumpy enough that most of its houses see one coast or the other. Supersky sees both. The villa stands on the peak of a hill above Saint-Jean, looking south across a green slope to the salt pond at Salines and out to the Caribbean past it; from the same deck, off to the side, the airport runway threads along Saint-Jean Bay. The lap pool faces the southern view. Saint-Jean is the glance over the shoulder.

The plan is unusual. The house is one building wrapped around a hole: a covered atrium open to the sky, with a plunge pool in the courtyard at the centre, three bedrooms pushed out into the corners, and the living spaces between them. To get from one wing to the next you walk around the pool. The arrangement reads more Roman than Caribbean, a peristyle designed for a climate that calls for one. Only the roof betrays the location: the traditional Saint-Barth hipped pitches, several of them rising in a coral-terracotta tile that anchors the otherwise white-painted everything-else.

Inside, the house is almost spartan. The floors are polished screed. The walls, the rafters, the structural columns and the louvered partitions are all painted white. Furniture is unpainted distressed wood: a low coffee table that looks like it began life as a workbench, a console in raw timber, slipcovered sofas in unbleached cotton. The kitchen counters and bathroom surfaces are a soft grey slab, likely a high-finished concrete, that catches light without bouncing it. A heavy wooden table for eight stands in the living pavilion, ringed by Asian-inflected leather chairs. The character comes from the bones of the building and the discipline of leaving it alone.

Cross-ventilation runs through the central living space. Louvered openings on the courtyard side, sliding glass to the deck on the other; the trade winds do the rest. The room has no air conditioning and asks for none. The same room holds the dining table, with three deep slipcovered sofas arranged in a U around it, so dinner and lounging happen in the same square of floor. Behind sits the kitchen, open in the American sense, with generous counters, picture windows to the southern view, and equipment that runs from a Nespresso to a portable wine cellar.

The two pools are the second feature people remember. The plunge pool sits in the courtyard at the centre of the house, walled in by louvered shutters that filter the daylight into ribbons across the water. It is the inward pool, for the heat of the afternoon, for cooling off without leaving a conversation. The lap pool, twenty-three feet by thirteen on the south-facing deck, is the outward one, for swimming with the long view straight ahead.

Three bedrooms occupy the corners of the floor plan. Each has a wall-mounted television, a wicker chair, an ensuite with a shower, and air conditioning. The beds are European queens, slightly smaller than American kings but not by much. One of the rooms takes two queens that can stand together or split into a twin pair, which makes the villa workable for two couples travelling with one or two children, three couples together, or a family whose grown-up children want their own room.

There are no immediate neighbours, which is unusual for Saint-Jean and a function of how high the villa sits. The drive up is straightforward; no four-wheel-drive is needed. The breeze keeps mosquitoes off. Saint-Jean Bay and its restaurants are five minutes down the hill; Saline and Gouverneur beaches are ten minutes the other way; Gustavia is ten minutes by road. The airport sits in plain sight below the deck, which guests find amusing on the first afternoon and never think about again.

What Supersky offers is specific. The newer villas of Saint-Barth chase architectural fashion; Supersky doesn't. The structure is old Saint-Barth, the interior is empty and white, the air conditioning is the trade wind, and the view does the rest. Guests who arrive expecting marble and chrome are sometimes thrown by the simplicity. Guests who arrive expecting silence and a long horizon tend to come back.