It’s an indelible image of an unforgettable woman. Princess Diana is sitting by a pool, a few months before she died, her hair windswept and her smile relaxed. She’s on vacation in an elite, discreet enclave in the Caribbean, an island she treasured as one of the few places she could wander undisturbed by the paparazzi: Barbuda. At that time, it was a jet-set escape, centered on the K Club, a small resort owned by Italian fashion entrepreneur Mariuccia Mandelli of Krizia. “Princess Diana walked past me on the beach there,” recalls interior designer Tara Bernerd, who vacationed at the retreat with her father, Elliott Bernerd, one of Britain’s most successful property developers. The K Club was seen as a low-key counterpart to Mustique or St. Barts. “The island was still very undeveloped. And the K Club was effortlessly chic, a quiet hidden-away place. It wasn’t trying to be showy, and for that, it was so beautiful.”
Alexander de Souza was one of the bartenders at the K Club. “She would come down in mid-November and stay until New Year,” he recalls of Mandelli. A local shopkeeper describes the K Club as “a hotel for celebrities before everyone was a celebrity. The woman who owned it had lots of flamboyant friends,” she adds. “The Aga Khan came into my shop one Christmas Day.” It was a fleeting moment, though. By 2004, the almost 80-year-old Mandelli was in poor health, and the hotel was mothballed; she died, just over a decade later, at the age of 90. As a result, the glitterati moved on, taking Barbuda off their vacation lists. At least, until now.
It’s the last natural paradise left in the Caribbean that you can actually do something on. It’s untouched.
There are big plans afoot for the pancake-flat island, which sits 30 miles north of its sibling, Antigua. It’s sparsely populated, and with barely 1,300 residents spread across 62 square miles, Barbuda is among the least densely settled islands of the region. It’s rich in natural beauty, though: There are acres of protected wetlands—including a frigate-bird sanctuary—a vast lagoon on the island’s west side, and a series of white-sand beaches that are arguably among the Caribbean’s finest; the standout is Princess Diana Beach, where the K Club once sat. Those plans, though, face fierce opposition from some locals. Activists argue that the major transformation underway violates not only long-standing customs regarding communal land ownership but also the island’s constitution—and are challenging the development deals in court. Ask anyone about what construction crews have been building (in some cases, nearly to completion), and the factual details will likely be the same. The perspectives on those structures, though, are starkly different.
Princess Diana Beach, a narrow stretch of sand on the unspoiled southwestern coast.
Alfonso Duran
Most of the parties involved can agree on only one thing: The story starts on September 6, 2017. That’s when Hurricane Irma, after days spent churning into a record-breaking Category 5 storm out in the Atlantic, finally made landfall with a direct hit on Barbuda.
The prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda then and now, Gaston Browne, described the aftermath as “total devastation,” with over 90 percent of structures either damaged or destroyed. Hurricane José was expected to strike, too, a few days later, so inhabitants underwent a mandatory evacuation to Antigua en masse. In fact, José skirted the island but still left behind the same dilemma: how to rebuild and shore up the economy. “I went over there by helicopter to tour the island about two days after the hurricane, and the entire island was under water,” recalls Charles Fernandez, now minister for tourism, investment, aviation, and transportation. Before the hurricane hit, officials had begun to focus on ecotourism and sustainable luxury development on Barbuda; the disaster turbocharged plans for what he calls this “diamond in the rough.” Not that it would be easy. Among other problems, marketing the island would be a major challenge. “When Irma devastated Barbuda, Bermuda had to put out a disclaimer saying, ‘It’s not us, we’re OK,’ ” Fernandez points out.
The Lighthouse Bay Hotel is among the structures damaged by Hurricane Irma that the island has yet to raze or repair.
Alfonso Duran
Robert De Niro was already circling, having visited Barbuda decades ago and then spotting it while vacationing on friend James Packer’s yacht years later. His Paradise Found project centered on potentially reviving the K Club site for a new generation, and the government also sought out other partners, notably Patrón tequila and Paul Mitchell hair products cofounder John Paul DeJoria and Discovery Land Company, the ultra-high-net-worth vacation-home network established by Mike Meldman, perhaps best known for cofounding Casamigos tequila with George Clooney and Rande Gerber. It was DeJoria and his Peace Love & Happiness project that helped finance a brand-new airport, which opened last October and is big enough for much larger private jets than the old landing strip could handle. Kienan Brownrigg has been working on the residential components for Meldman’s firm for several years. It has the right to build and operate two sites: the 164-acre Coco Point development and another 800 acres across the same bay at Palmetto Point. The former, with 30 homes, is almost finished. “You’ll probably feel the soulful kind of connection there,” she says in a phone conversation before I fly down in June. “It’s almost wrapped up in a pretty bow, but we still have a few things we’re working on.” Palmetto Point will eventually be much larger but at the moment consists solely of an 18-hole Tom Fazio–designed golf course.
As for the former K Club site, that will soon reemerge as a 54-room Nobu Beach Inn, part of the hospitality empire cofounded by De Niro. It’s likely to open in early 2026, though there’s a restaurant that has been operating since 2020 right there on Princess Diana Beach, where chill-out house music wafts onto the sands. The entire branded project stretches over 400 acres and will also include ready-built residences and plots of land. “It’s the last natural paradise left in the Caribbean that you can actually do something on. It’s untouched. The beach is probably the or one of the best beaches in the Caribbean or the world,” says Daniel Shamoon, who runs London-based Luxury Hotel Partners with his sister, Jennica; it’s both a hotel operator and the company behind Small Luxury Hotels of the World. Shamoon and his team have managed construction of Nobu Barbuda and will handle day-to-day operations as well as real-estate sales. He’s equal partners with De Niro and Packer in the development. “It’s such a unique opportunity to have that much—2.1 miles—of beachfront, and it’s all pristine white and pink sand with just the most beautiful water and a sunset in front of you. I’ve never seen anything else that exists like that.” He proudly points out the pool at the heart of Nobu, a replica of the same one Diana once lounged beside. (The original, neglected for too long, had to be replaced.) “It gives you a sense of place, and that there’s something preserved. It was where the real iconic photos were taken, and it could tie the past and the present together.”
The Nobu Barbuda restaurant is already operational.
Alfonso Duran
The vision for Barbuda’s future as laid out by Fernandez, the tourism minister, is as a high-end, low-density resort-style island. With Rosewood set to operate another huge site just west of Nobu, upscale hospitality will take up almost the entire southern coast; the pair will be book-ended by the twin Discovery Land Company projects. It’s easy to see the appeal, with that wide, undisturbed beach edged by crystal-clear waters and uninterrupted sunsets. “People fly to the Maldives and French Polynesia looking to have an experience, where it’s actually much simpler to go somewhere like Barbuda,” says Shamoon. “As long as you tell the story right.”
Opponents would agree. But they would tell the same story in a very different way.
So, let’s rewind to September 6, 2017. Hurricane Irma made landfall with a direct hit on Barbuda—that much no one disputes. But local activists refute claims that 90 percent of the island’s buildings were destroyed. “It was a lie, one of the narratives put out,” says marine biologist John Mussington. “What happened after the hurricane was the greater disaster.” Mussington is the recently elected chairman of the Barbuda Council, the local government, and the retired high-school principal. “The way the disaster was handled kept Barbudans from doing their restoration and recovery, and the economy of Barbuda was killed by that.” Irma, Mussington and some other locals feel, provided a smoke screen for the central government to finally wrest control of the much smaller island away from its residents after years of tension.
Marine biologist John Mussington, who chairs the Barbuda Council, has emerged as a leading opponent of large-scale development on the island.
Alfonso Duran
It’s important to note that, though Antigua and Barbuda form a single nation today, their histories and geographies couldn’t be more distinctive. Relations between them are more like Antigua’s landscape—volcanic and rocky. That terrain primed it to operate sugar plantations in colonial times; flatter, drier Barbuda was ill-suited to that crop. As a result, its enslaved people lived differently than in much of the Caribbean, according to Mussington. “The skilled artisans, those responsible for doing the nitty-gritty of maintaining life on a plantation? They were the Barbudans, and so the family structure was not broken up—you cannot afford to sell those assets, a family of tanners or wheelwrights,” he explains. “It’s why we had the concreteness of community.”
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, and when the powerful, formerly slave-owning Codrington family stepped back from the island a few decades later, the culture left behind remained collectivist. No one owned land, but rather could petition the local authorities for a parcel on which they might build a house, for example. This system continued ad hoc until the 21st century, when a previous national government passed a 2007 act that enshrined Barbuda’s distinctive but deeply entrenched approach into law. Eight years later, a new government repealed that legislation and replaced it with the Paradise Found Act, named as a nod to De Niro and co., whose plans it would enable. The move was controversial, but locals assumed that they could successfully oppose this lone development.
In effect, the new rules allowed the central government on Antigua, rather than the Barbuda Council, to apportion land—leasing it, in the case of Nobu, for 99 years. When the hurricane struck, then, there was no framework to prevent a much wider, broader redevelopment program, one that Gearóid Ó Cuinn describes as “disaster capitalism.” He’s the founding director of the Global Legal Action Network, a nonprofit that works with small communities like this one facing legal issues. Cuinn explains the generally accepted meaning of the term: “That’s when huge disruption comes—wealthy interests move in to acquire previously protected sources for gain,” he tells Robb Report. “There’s a much bigger story of small island states desperate for money that capitulate to the interests of the wealthy.” In some cases, he notes, islanders cannot even access their own beaches. “In Jamaica, it’s like 2 percent of the coastline is open to the public, and Barbuda is in the process of being encircled.” (Technically, all Barbudan beaches are accessible, and it’s easy to wander along in front of Coco Point unchallenged, for example, as I did, and see folks enjoying the shallow waves off the promontory.)
Nobu Beach Inn.
Alfonso Duran
Beyond the disgruntlement common to locales everywhere when big developers arrive, Barbuda’s idiosyncratic customs around private property posed a more serious threat and enabled what activists describe as a land grab. After the hurricane, the central government in Antigua created a land registry, requiring Barbudans to show documentation proving their right to occupy the land. Unregistered real estate would then revert to the government, which could dispose of it. Given the historic system of communal ownership, many Barbudans refused on principle to participate in the process, despite the government’s offer to “sell” them the properties for a mere $1 per acre.
It was a deeply unfair system in the view of Gulliver Johnson, a land activist who emphasizes that the biggest sticking point today isn’t tourism. “No Barbudan has any problem serving you a drink or doing the water sports,” he says. “If we own the land, we’ll do it happily.” Rather, the problem is the real-estate programs that run alongside the hospitality developments: All the projects have a villa component, and Discovery Land Company is predicated on member-owners, which rubs many locals the wrong way philosophically. Its business model around the world focuses on creating gated communities aimed at wealthy vacationers, whose home-ownership makes them entitled to use the extensive facilities always incorporated in its master plans.
Johnson insists that it’s unlawful to sell, or even lease, land under the country’s constitution; only the Barbuda Council, and not the authorities in Antigua, he claims, can dole out property. “Antagonism has existed for 100 years plus—and probably a hell of a lot longer—between Antigua and Barbuda,” he says of the motivations of the central government. “This is a luxury real-estate-sales program under the guise of hotels and tourism.”
Mussington puts it more simply. “The phrase I’ve seen on the actual master plans is the creation of exclusive residential communities,” he says. “Who are you excluding? It’s us.”
Johnson, Mussington, and others are making their case in lawsuits filed in the U.K. (Though independent, Antigua and Barbuda is governed by a constitutional monarchy—reigned over by King Charles—so the Privy Council is the ultimate arbiter.) In the suits, the plaintiffs contest the legal authority of the central government to sell or lease Barbuda’s land.
That’s when huge disruption comes—wealthy interests move in to acquire previously protected sources for gain.
Government officials and the developers, meanwhile, downplay any discord. Charles Fernandez, the tourism minister, dismisses the controversies as a “storm in a teacup.” Nobu’s Daniel Shamoon notes that 90 percent of the resort’s construction crew comes from the local community. “I meet [the activists] and talk with them, and I know that some of them work for us,” he says. “It’s a small number of people making a big shout about everything.” He criticizes what he sees as some opponents’ refusal to compromise. Shamoon adds that he has always championed turning 80 percent of the island into a protected national park, while the rest incorporates developments he describes as “in keeping with the island’s architecture and landscaping,” as, he maintains, his efforts will be. “If you have an all-or-nothing [approach],” he warns, “you’ll end up with nothing at the end of the day.”
As I raise the issues at stake while riding in a shared taxi through town, my fellow passengers’ views differ. One grumbles when the driver rants about development’s ravages. “What else can they do?” she says, under her breath. Mention of Nobu sparks less ire than the others. “They pay their taxes, like they should, so government wages are paid on time now,” says another resident, a little grudgingly. Flying down from New York, striking up a conversation with my seatmate, I had learned she’s a Barbudan who has worked as a nanny in New York for many years. “Some people are still living in tents,” she says of life after the hurricane. “My mom’s house was only rebuilt because we could help.”
Like all beaches in Barbuda, Princess Diana Beach remains public and accessible to local residents despite the hotel development.
Alfonso Duran
Neither side seems willing to extend even a modicum of trust to the other—or to a journalist like me, visiting to report on the standoff. Johnson, who’d happily spoken by phone before my trip, backs out of meeting me in person as planned, having learned that I was also interviewing the developers. “I don’t feel comfortable contributing to a report that there is a debate [over the issue],” he writes in an email. He continues, “Just tired of feeding a narrative pushing someone else’s agenda.”
Meanwhile, I was also scheduled to tour Discovery Land Company’s dual projects with Kienan Brownrigg, an energetic Bahamian who even offered to attend Barbuda’s small but lively carnival weekend, known as Caribana, which coincided with my visit. We discussed the trip with a publicist for the firm a few days before my arrival. “Robb Report is, like, fluffy journalism,” the rep said. “Is that not the case for this?” I pushed back, explaining that we’d follow standard journalistic protocols, aiming to air both sides’ views. A few hours later, in a brusque email, that rep told me, without explanation, that Brownrigg was no longer available, but I could submit questions for response by email if needed.
My experience grows even stranger once I arrive in Barbuda. I’d reached out to the tourism board before my trip, a common gesture for assistance with logistics and fact-checking, and it had helped to plan my visit. For that reason, its representatives knew when I’d be on the island. On my second day there, I set out for a pre-arranged lunch and find an unexpected companion waiting for me: a Norwegian expat who’d been dispatched from Antigua by that board. “I’m here to show you some Caribbean hospitality,” she says brightly, explaining her role would be to accompany me on all my planned meetings from that point. For media working like this, there are times when an escort is helpful (typically, only for film crews). But a reporter working on a story like mine would never request or permit an escort—after all, how can someone talk freely about a subject while being observed, however cheerily, by the government? I decline the offer; it feels less like support, I explain, than surveillance. I continue, solo, as planned. At least she gets to enjoy a lovely lunch.
Since Nobu has yet to open, I stay at Barbuda Belle, a high-end eight-room resort on the northwestern tip of the island, reachable only by speedboat through the mangrove-edged vastness of Codrington Lagoon. It’s next to the frigate-bird sanctuary, and every cottage—built on stilts, to better weather hurricanes—has an uninterrupted view of the sunset. One American couple checks in for their honeymoon. “I told my friends we were coming here, and they thought it was Bermuda,” the bride says with a laugh. “I loved that.”
Barbuda Belle opened in 2015, and all but one of the bungalows survived Hurricane Irma. The family who built it is from St. Maarten and petitioned to use the land via the traditional channel of the Barbuda Council. It raises no hackles among locals when mentioned. The staff is almost entirely local, including K Club veteran Alexander de Souza, a genial presence with a jaunty earring who’ll whip up a lethal rum punch for a sundowner, and another staffer who brings a fruit plate every morning at breakfast. “Breathe and relax,” she says, inhaling loudly and gesturing to the near silence. Barbuda Belle offers a sense of being almost, maybe, at the edge of the world, the ideal hideaway removed from the outside hubbub and untroubled by it—a K Club for today.
What everyone seems to agree on is that both this hotel and that long-lost one represent a compromise between the operators and the community, delivering luxury hospitality that each set of stakeholders can embrace. Here, it’s easy to see why anyone would relish a visit to the island. But until the turmoil around the new arrivals settles down, it’s hard to picture relaxing on those near-perfect sands over on the southern coast in quite the same way.
Authors
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Mark Ellwood
