These Caribbean Villas Are All About Low-Key Luxury

In the design wars of quiet versus ostentatious luxury, there is another way: low-key luxury. It doesn’t leave any doubt about its high-end nature nor does it shy away from labels that might grab your attention. But its selling point is quite simple—you won’t get more comfortable than this.

In the case of hotels, that’s very much the selling point of the new villas at Beach Enclave North Shore in Turks and Caicos. These low-key but spectacular houses have made the hotel the latest selection for Room Key, our series on exciting new hotels.

The Turks and Caicos islands are directly north from Haiti and southeast from the Bahamas. A British Overseas Territory, it has exploded in popularity recently in no small part due to a large choice of direct flights from major American cities. While many islands in the Caribbean have clear waters, if you talk to anybody who has been to Turks and Caicos one of the first things they’ll probably say is along the lines of, “Is it not the most beautiful water over there or what?”

If the water is the lead actor here, the breeze is best supporting because it not only makes everything pleasant even late into the season, but it also makes the islands one of the best places for wind sports. And one of the best places on the islands for kitesurfing is found on Long Bay, a stretch of soft, fine-grain beach on the south side where you can wade waist-deep out in the clear water for a mile.

Here, Beach Enclave has roughly half a dozen of its 32 villas found around the island of Providenciales. Some of the villas are two story houses in what I’d call a modern Caribbean style while a few are modernist geometrical works of concrete discreetly set amidst palm trees. These modernist homes were our first stop. Two bedrooms are upstairs, with the master cantilevered out over the back patio. Downstairs there’s a full kitchen and living room opening out onto a pool, hot tub, and a private swath of the beach. Whiling away the hours watching kite surfers cruise by is devilishly easy here.

All of the villas, which start at $2,500 a night (the second highest rate on the island after Amanyara), come with a butler who makes a continental breakfast each morning. There is a full gym, equipment for kayaking, paddle boarding and snorkeling. Also included is something more active like a kiteboarding lesson or kayak eco tour. We opted for a kiteboarding lesson, which was a lesson in humility as time and again we found ourselves yanked up in the air and splattered on that beautiful clear water.

Carved into stone cliffs on the northern side of the island are Beach Enclave’s newest villas, and the main reason we came. Beach Enclave North Shore’s rectangular villas designed by Brazilian firm Jacobson Arquitetura are a crisp white and cascade down the honey-colored stone face, which gives this complex more of a Greek island feel. Inside, the villas are modern monastic–pale stone floors, almost entirely bare white walls, as well as white upholstered furnishings and bedspreads. If that sounds stark, keep in mind that almost all the bedrooms and living spaces have floor-to-ceiling views of the neon blue water just below.

I’ve been to many hotels with superb views, but I have to admit that on the uppermost waterfront bedrooms here the view is startling in a way I’ve rarely experienced.

Everything about the experience is laid back. You wake up to breakfast from the butler next to your private pool and you spend the day reading, snorkeling, or kitesurfing and your kids exhausting themselves on the calm beach just feet from your living room. At night, the hotel has a chef you can hire to create a dinner (we chose one that focused on food from the Caribbean), you can cook in the full kitchen, or go out to a restaurant in town. The property’s sole weak spot—it only has one F&B outlet on the properties, a small beachside bar with a small but for-all-ages menu—is being addressed, as they’re planning a beach club in the next expansion.