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The JacobPost is a publication of General Intelegence, inc.1-2.comA Magazine StandThat's in Your Hand

Building the Worlds Most Beautiful Resort: Frenchmans Cove - By Shannon Ricketts

In 1956, a Canadian business tycoon, Garfield Weston, purchased 45 acres of prime seaside property in Jamaica with the intent of developing a retreat for himself and his staff. What Mr. Weston had not realized, however, was that the deed to the property stipulated that it had to be developed as a public resort a clause that led to the design and construction of one of the most memorable resorts in the history of Caribbean tourism.

After a desultory attempt at developing a plan for the site, Garfield Weston decided to hand over the job of designing a resort that would do justice to the remarkable site to his eldest son, Grainger Weston. As with many of the worlds most engaging places, the location known as Frenchmans Cove casts a mesmeric spell over all who see it. Grainger fell in love with it, just as his father had. Frenchmans Cove is located on the northwest shore of Jamaica in the parish of Portland. In this secluded corner of the island, mountains run down to the sea, creating hidden little coves and catching clouds which bring just enough rainfall to ensure the riot of lush tropical growth that fringes the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean Sea.

Frenchmans Cove: its very name evokes a romantic and mysterious past, part of which includes a chapter in Jamaicas infamous sugar industry. A sugar mill was once located on the fresh water stream that flows down the mountains into the cove. Later the property was owned by the famed banana-king Lorenzo Dow Baker. Eventually purchased by a consortium, Cold Harbour Estates, with the intent of enhancing the high-end tourism offer of the local San San area (a stretch of the mountainous coastline just east of the Parish capital Port Antonio), the owners had inserted the agreement to develop the property in its sale to Garfield Weston. When he passed responsibility for the propertys development to his son Grainger, a new chapter began, linking Frenchmans Cove with the recent arrival of the Texans to Jamaicas famed North Coast.

Grainger Weston, who ran a branch of the Weston biscuit empire from his home in Texas, immediately introduced well-known Texan architect William Tamminga to the site. In the late 1950s, wealthy Texan investors had hired American architect Gershon Canaan along with Tamminga to build a series of villas grouped around an old Great House further up the coast near Montego Bay. This was the Tryall Club, complete with championship golf course designed by the famed Ralph Plummer. The idea of separate luxury villas discretely located on a gated property serviced by an attentive staff was gaining popularity with the super rich. The nearby Round Hill resort was developed on a similar plan without a golf course but with luxurious, privately owned villas and even more famous glitterati in residence. In the United States, the Sea Pines Resort at Hilton Head Island in South Carolina was being developed at about the same time. Known as a plantation community, it offered beachfront lots developed with substantial villas amid natural vegetation enhanced with tennis courts and a golf course designed by George Cobb.

At Frenchmans Cove, Grainger Weston would take exclusivity to another level. He too would preserve the natural landscape, setting stunning little villas along the dramatic seaside cliffs, discretely screened from one another for maximum privacy. However, these cottages would not be sold individually as at Tryall, Round Hill and Hilton Head but would remain the property of the resort which would offer its guests the ultimate in anything-you-could-want service. Grainger was advised on this new concept of the all-inclusive resort by respected Swiss hotelier Jean-Pierre Aubry. If the resort did not have the specific brand of champagne asked for, staff would fly to Miami to purchase it.

Now to turn this mostly wild site into a tamed but romantic version of itself: along with William Tamminga as architect, Grainger Weston brought on board the talented Texas-based landscape architect team of Arthur and Marie Berger. William Tamminga was a native of Texas whose family had been in the construction business since the late nineteenth century. Tamminga, an alumnus of the University of Texas, had developed a very successful architectural practice and was well-known locally for his modernist domestic design as well as for the Trinity University in San Antonio. He also worked with well-known modernist architect ONeil Ford, collaborating with him on the construction of the Texas Instruments Research Laboratories in Houston. Tamminga also carried out several contracts for resort design during the post-war tourism boom including projects on the French Riviera as well as in Jamaica. Eventually, much of his work would be lost to demolition or massive redevelopment so it is remarkable that what may be his best-known work, Frenchmans Cove Resort, is among the rare intact survivors.

Unlike the Tryall Club where the villas, perhaps in deference to the nineteenth-century Great House around which they are sited, are designed in a romantic version of the Georgian vernacular, those at Frenchmans Cove are unabashedly modernist. Here, there is also a central Great House but being built anew, this relatively modest two-storey rectangular building was purpose-built as a hotel and reflects the modernist theme of the property. Providing individual guest rooms and suites, the Great House also offered a central dining and entertainment centre romantically set within an expansive covered terrace. However, the jewels of the property are the sixteen private villas that are scattered over the park-like grounds. These glass and limestone-faced cottages nestle under copper-clad pitched roofs whose generous overhangs shade terraces opening off the buildings sliding glass walls (Figure 4). The subtle siting of these structures creates the illusion of belonging to the landscape. In the larger villas, this is ensured through the use of a bi-nuclear plan with additional sleeping quarters provided in a separate building linked to the main cottage by flagstone steps and covered walkways. Deceptive in their apparent simplicity, these cottages were daringly modern at the time of construction.

The sense of the interiors flowing organically into the landscape was a mark of the successful collaboration between Tamminga and the talented landscape architects Arthur and Marie Berger. The Bergers had met during World War II and married in the 1940s after each of them had been working independently as landscape architects for some years. Arthur Berger (1903-1960) graduated in landscape architecture from Harvard University in 1928 and moved to Dallas Texas in 1939 when he was hired to design a garden for Texas Instrument founder Everett Lee. Marie Berger (1907-1963), a graduate in landscape architecture from Oregon State University, had worked in the San Francisco office of Thomas Church, a pioneer in modernist landscape architecture, before joining Arthur in Dallas. There, Everett Lee and his wife introduced Arthur to architect ONeal Ford with whom the Bergers would eventually collaborate on the Texas Instrument Headquarters, along with William Tamminga.

Meanwhile, the Bergers were becoming well-known for their landscaping of ONeal Fords modernist homes in the Dallas area. In the period before air-conditioning, the team became well-known for stunningly modernist buildings that made the most of prevailing breezes, views, contrasts of light and shade, and that were intimately connected to uncluttered landscapes through glass doors leading out to terraces constructed of local stone. Large canopy trees shaded the houses and the surrounding evergreen ground covers. When the Bergers joined with William Tamminga to develop plans for the Frenchmans Cove resort in Jamaica, they would use many of the same devices. While earlier designers had imposed symmetry on the natural word, these modernist designers aimed to make the most of local conditions by fitting their buildings into the environment, linking them to naturalistic gardens that led seamlessly to the broader landscape. Buildings became part of the landscape.

At Frenchmans Cove, the plan centres on the mountain stream that flows into the sheltered cove for which the site is named. Visitors leave the main road and pass through the resorts great gates on a winding drive that leads immediately to a small, low reception building. Here the cars are parked, guests assigned to their rooms at the Great House or in their individual villas and transported up winding paths that lead to the secluded structures which are scattered on the twin plateaus flanking the cove. These access paths lead gradually through a parkland where swathes of open grass are shaded by spreading canopy trees and where visitors catches fleeting views of copper-roofed cottages perched at the edge of the cliffs. Emerging from the quiet parkland into the microclimate of the cottage, the sea suddenly reasserts itself with the sound of pounding surf on the rocks below and glimpses of glittering turquoise waters through surrounding foliage. In the best of the Picturesque tradition, views from the cottages frame breath-taking pictures of land and sea. How many visitors are aware of how skillfully they have been separated from the hectic world outside and led in subtle steps to this climactic paradisial scene?

This sensitive treatment of the extraordinary site emerged from the modernist aesthetic where, as in the Bergers work in Texas, buildings seemed a natural part of the landscape as well as from the older tradition of the Picturesque, so loved by British gardeners such as Walter and Gertrude Jekyll and American painter Frederick Church all earlier visitors to Jamaica who had been captivated by its natural beauty. Since the 1930s, North and South American designers had been making use of the new continents extraordinary native species. Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) was amongst the earliest. The kind of modernism espoused by Americans such as Thomas Church and Garret Eckbo, so familiar to Marie Berger, developed from the Prairie School of Landscape Gardening that Jens Jensen had brought to the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. Building and garden worked together to facilitate human engagement with the natural world. Marie Berger had learned directly from Thomas Churchs designs where the landscape was tightly designed closest to the house and gradually expanded along planned views with a lessening degree of intervention the farther one traveled from the building. Everywhere the design remained dynamic, sweeping curves replacing formal axes and, rather than using formally organized bedding plants, the sculptural quality of foliage and trees was enhanced. All this was easily accessed from the building interiors through sliding glass walls. Building and garden were experienced as a single entity. Walter Berger may have been exposed to such ideas at Harvard where the influential modernist landscape architect Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) was much admired. Thinned woods and meadows, much like those at Frenchmans Cove, were also a hallmark of the modernist landscapes implemented by the influential Serge Chermayeff who was designing modernist properties in England in the 1930s.

Now, some sixty years later, Frenchmans Cove, has weathered not only hurricanes but also the winds of political and economic change. And it has survived. Repaired after many devastating storms, Frenchmans Cove Resort now offers a much reduced level of service but has maintained its remarkable architecture and landscape in an intact state. It draws a clientele that appreciates the quiet, ecologically diverse corner of Jamaica which they can explore independently from the reclusive beauty of the resorts generous property. As huge, monolithic resorts take over more and more of Jamaicas north coast, Frenchmans Cove Resort remains a pristine gem reflecting not only a time of unbridled luxury, but most importantly, an era when design expressed an intention to reflect natures beauty in a pure form.

By Shannon Knight-Ricketts

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Marguerite Curtin, Tryall, Hanover, Jamaica (Marguerite Curtin, 2004), p. 43.. The Alcade (University of Texas), Jan/Feb. 1988.The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Biography for Arthur S. and Marie H. Berger, (http:// pioneer.arthur Berger/biography)Kurt Culbertson, Texas Chiarascuro: The Life and Work of Arthur S. and Marie H. Berger, (kurtculbertson.blogspot.com)See Reuben M. Rainey, Organic Form in the Humanized Landscape: Garrett Eckbos Landscape for Living, Landscape Architecture, January 1942, p. 180.See Marc Treib (ed.), Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), p 29.Christopher Tunnard was invited to lecture at Harvard during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ibid, p. 144 and Christopher Tunnard, Modern Gardens for Modern Houses: Reflections on Current Trends in Landscape Design, in Landscape Architecture, January 1942Astounding Vacation RetreatsFor now, this giant yacht is a fantasy sketch that would cost "hundreds of millions of euros to build.Photo: Yacht Island Design

While the terms "houseboat" and "floating home" are sometimes used interchangeably, not everyone realizes the distinction.A floating home sits on a slab in the water and wont be going anywhere, while a houseboat is capable of propelling to distant lands and moorings.

World travelers may have seen (or even stayed in) the antique wooden boats of Srinagar, India, but this list also includes modern abodes and quickly escalates to boats nicer than many primary homes of landlubbers.Although the following floating homes might not all be used as permanent residences now, a boat home does have its appeal to those concerned about rising sea levels due to global warming. One day, owners of buoyant homes may be extra grateful they made the investment.

While it is stationary, this gives new meaning to your island home.

"I wanted it to be like an updated Frank Lloyd Wright home but with an open New York Loft condo style mixed with a mid-century Eichler home post and beam style," wrote MetroShip creator David Ballinger Jr. on the company website.His creations, a unique and highly customizable line of houseboats, are built in the U.S. from aluminum and steel, plus single-piece roofs and high-quality doors and windows. They also come with a W Hotel bed, a Danish sound system, Viking appliances, HDTV projector and an LG steam washer/dryer.He designed the ceilings to be high so no one feels cramped.Pricing starts at $75,000 for a 35-foot MetroShip and at $120,000 for a 48-footer.The company is also planning a 110-foot "Mega MetroShip" yacht.

The Dubai houseboat can be used as a weekend home or event space.Photo: X-ArchitectsThis architectural houseboat is constructed from two catamaran beams, stainless steel and glass from the Dubai firm X-Architects in collaboration with its owner, interior decorator/architect/designer Leen Vandaele, who might use the O as a prototype for a floating hotel.The vessel can be used as a weekend home or an event space. It has bedrooms, a hidden kitchen, a dining area and a spiral staircase to a sun deck.Yacht Island