The Haute Bungalow

With her first hotel in the Caribbean, Jocelyne Sibuet, the Martha Stewart of France, has transported her brand of St Tropez chic to St Barth.

- Ann Abel

You have to deserve St Barth.” That’s how Marie-Christine Albini, the general manager of the new Villa Marie Saint-Barth, describes the Caribbean island’s character. There’s no elitism intended, but a sense of knowingness pervades. Part of what makes the place so appealing is that it’s a haven for what’s known as the “gypset”—people of considerable good fortune who travel to spots where they can play for a few days as if they were just like anyone else. In order to visit St Barth, you need a high limit on your credit card. In order to deserve St Barth, you have to appreciate the lowkey luxuries, the elemental simplicity and the quiet glamour of some of the world’s best small resorts, as well as the Michelin-calibre meals and the jeroboams of spouting champagne.

Villa Marie is everything that makes the down-to-earth side of St Barth so appealing. It’s the 11th intimate retreat from the highly regarded hotelier Jocelyne Sibuet— best known for the Alpine getaway Les Fermes de Marie—and her first hotel outside of Continental France.

It is for good reason that Sibuet is known as the Martha Stewart of France. While she honed her signature aesthetic in her native Alps, where she now has seven hotels, she had no trouble capturing the bohemian spirit of the French West Indies island. “I want people to wake up and know they’re in St Barth,” she says of the hotel, which is set above the beach in Colombier and which she built with her ex-husband and business partner, Jean-Louis. “That’s very important. Other hotels here are more formal.”