St. Barts Is Back

The glamorous getaway is just as you remember. But better

- Nikki Ekstein

From where I sit on a deep, citrine colored couch in the living room of Villa Marie, it’s hard to imagine that anything around me is new. The African beaded necklaces, displayed on shelves just so, feel like they were arranged there long ago by a careful collector. The shuttered windows and beams in the plantation-style ceiling vividly evoke colonial- era Caribbean originals. The server who brings my fennel-and- ginger detox juice is decidedly youthful, but also practiced and charming.

And yet this is St. Barts, where almost all things have been rebuilt from scratch. “Everything you see, it was all gone,” says Nicolas Rondelli, the hotel’s general manager. He, too, is new—a recent transplant from Corsica. “The roof above our heads? This is what it looked like just over a year ago,” he says, pulling out a photograph taken on Sept. 6, 2017, the day after Hurricane Irma made landfall as a Category 5 storm. I see the same room we’re sitting in, but it’s ravaged, with upturned chairs, blown shutters, and a wide-open sky overhead.

“It looked like King Kong came in with a temper tantrum,” recalls David Zipkin, co-founder and vice president of regional airline Tradewind Aviation. “Boats in the street, cars stacked three on top of each other.”