Scrub Island, Scrub Island, British Virgin Islands · Caribbean

You reach Scrub Island by water. It sits off the north-east coast of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, 230 acres of steep green hillside with a sheltered anchorage on its lee, and for most of its history nothing else. The name is four centuries old and comes from what the place was for: when these islands were a haven for pirates and buccaneers, crews hauled their boats onto the shallows here and scrubbed the barnacles from the hulls before heading back out to sea. Three and a half centuries later, the island was still bare, with no road, no water, no power, nothing at all.

Working on a remote island shaped the practical decisions as much as the aesthetic ones. Small portions of coral reef were relocated with marine specialists so nothing of the reef was lost. Roofs catch rainwater into cisterns for irrigation, solar power supplies the resort, and the design accounts for the steep topography and its run-off to the sea. Hurricane resistance and passive cooling are built into the structures. Local contractors were engaged from the outset, working in materials and techniques they knew, which kept the resort rooted in the place.

The resort opened as the first new development of its kind in the British Virgin Islands in more than fifteen years, and became the first in the Caribbean to join Marriott’s Autograph Collection. Mainsail returned to OBMI afterwards to extend it, adding thirty-seven hilltop bungalows stepped around the hillside in phases, with lagoon pools below, each set into the terrain for privacy and the long view out.