Barbados’s Sandy Lane: high-luxe style with low-gear ambience
Thompson certainly built the largest spa in the Caribbean, a 47,000-square-foot building with a Las Vegas-y faux waterfall in front that flows into the 7,500-square-foot resort pool. The entryway is an open, columned rotunda in which curling, make-an-entrance staircases descend to the spa level. The 11 treatment rooms, which lie along a dimly lit, gently curving corridor, have their own bathrooms and showers. (They were designed for celebrities, who won’t usually put up with using a locker room.) Nine of them have private gardens, and in three of those there are private outdoor hydrotherapy pools. In the public areas, space is used lavishly for effect. The treatment-room corridor ends in a small rotunda that holds three tall creamy white amphorae, and the hydrotherapy pool is part of a faux-grotto stage set, with burly blocks of coral stone cut and dressed to evoke an architectural ruin.
There’s a cool classicism to the spa architecture and decor. It’s clearly seen in spa’s relax room.
What is striking about the spa is the quiet. Where is everyone? I wondered on my second morning as I lay in the relax room, a soothing spectrum of whites (a scheme borrowed from Les Thermes Marins at the Hotel Hermitage in Monaco), waiting for my therapist. At the beach and pool, it turns out: Only 20 percent of the hotel guests use the spa (up from 11 percent when it opened), and aside from the 4 to 7 p.m. rush hour, you can have the run of the place. In three days I never met another person in the locker room–and the resort was nearly full during my stay.
The relax room and adjoining hydrotherapy pool became my resort within a resort, with its own spa buffet: Crystal Laconium Steam Room, where an amethyst crystal is intended to transfer energy to you (didn’t work on me); aromatherapy steam shower; and hydro pool vitality beds, one hidden in a stone niche. My headquarters was a relax bed in the corner of the room. Made of mahogany and one of the most difficult pieces to source, according to Thompson, the beds have thick white pads and voluptuous curves–like a caterpillar doing the limbo. The shape drops your derriere, supports your lower back, raises your legs slightly, and causes you to sort of pool. With running water in the background as my soundtrack, I dropped off to sleep on both days that I holed up here. You know you’ve slept soundly when it takes a visit to the spa’s Ice Cave to drive out the cobwebs.

Popularity: 1%