In 1992 Architectural Digest visited David Bowie & Iman‘s retreat on the island of Mustique. According to the story,
“Five years and more than fourteen cargo containers in the making, culminating in an Indonesian-style pavilion that horseshoes around two koi-filled ponds that descend burblingly toward the setting sun into a sort of trompe-l’eau sluice from which dark water appears to emerge magically pristine as it pours into the swimming pool. ‘It’s a whim personified,” says David Bowie. ‘I love a good cliché, and this house for me is just the most delightful cliché.’
‘Frankly, it was quite odd. I went down to spend a couple of days with Mick and Jerry in their house, and while waiting for the boat—I was going to take a trip up and down the Caribbean and it never happened because the propeller fell out or something—I was stranded. And I just went scouting one day, having nothing better to do, there being little else to do there, and I came across this area of land attached to Arne Hasselqvist’s. And we talked about it, and I thought, Why not?’
He spends five or six weeks on Mustique over Christmas, and then goes back for a bit in midyear. He says he keeps things intimate, inviting just a small circle of friends, Iman and his twenty-one-year-old son, Zowie, now called Joe.
‘I throw one big party a year. This year it was a New Year’s party, the theme being the seventies. I put on a disco, and Iman brought a mirrored ball down with her, an electric one. We had dinner for fifty but then invited people in for dancing afterwards. They all go down to Basil’s when they’ve had enough. That’s the one bar on the island, I’m up on the hill, which keeps me away from the odd tourist boat, which is getting less and less frequent because we’re being quite strict about what anchorage we’ll make available, because one used to get tourists coming up in cars and people-spotting, of course, basically because of Mick, myself and Princess Margaret’s house.’
‘My ambition is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever and then I’ll be able to spend the entire year on the island.”
Looks like heaven.
(Photos, Derry Moore ; via Architectural Digest)