My two-bedroom suite at The Landings in St Lucia was 1,870 square feet – closer in scale to a house than a hotel room.
There were four-poster beds, marble bathrooms, a kitchen with all the mod cons and a hot tub bubbling away on the terrace. What delighted me most, though, were the pillowcases, embroidered with my initials before I arrived. It was the sort of gloriously unnecessary detail that makes you feel rather more important than you are. A spread of fruit, cheese and charcuterie waited on the dining table, and the rooms smelt faintly of lemongrass.
St Lucia looks more remote in photographs than it is to reach. Flights from London take around eight and a half hours, depositing you on an island that is steep, folded and almost indecently green, with fishing villages strung along the coast and the Pitons rising from the south-west like a logo made geological. There is rainforest to hike through, reef to snorkel, cacao to turn into chocolate and, if the mood takes you, a volcano you can drive into.
The Landings sits at the island’s north-western tip, about 90 minutes from Hewanorra airport, on St Lucia’s drier, livelier side. Rodney Bay is close for restaurants and shops, Gros Islet for its Friday-night street party and Pigeon Island for views and a dose of history. Opened in 2007, the resort has an 800-foot sweep of pale sand and the only private resort marina in northern St Lucia. Guests arriving by yacht from Martinique can moor within metres of their suite.
The Vibe
The atmosphere is closer to a particularly comfortable family house party than a conventional resort. During my stay, British and North American families arrived with children, grandparents and enough luggage to suggest they might be settling in permanently. The multi-bedroom suites make three generations under one roof genuinely manageable; four pools mean everyone can disappear again when required.
Many residences are privately owned and return to the rental pool when their owners are elsewhere, which explains why the place feels lived in. Plenty of guests come back at the same time every year.
I arrived during Carnival and quickly discovered that St Lucians do not regard the relative merits of Caribbean carnivals as a subject requiring much debate. Staff assured me, repeatedly and emphatically, that theirs was the best in the region. That same exuberance carried through the hotel: everyone I met was warm, funny and gloriously cheerful, with a sense of the island’s spirit threading through the polish of the resort.
The Rooms
Cream buildings with terracotta roofs curl around the marina, joined by bridges and tropical gardens. Inside, white walls, dark timber and tiled floors keep things traditional, loosened up with flashes of blue, coral and green. All accommodation is suite-style, with one to four bedrooms overlooking either the marina or sea. ‘Suite’ undersells them somewhat: these are apartments, with living rooms, dining tables, generous terraces and, in many cases, private plunge pools. Mine mixed dark wood and pale stone with sea-blue and coral accents. The kitchen had an oven, hob, full-sized fridge, dishwasher, coffee machine and enough equipment to prepare a three-course dinner, which a private chef will happily do.
The Food + Drink
The Beach Club is the all-day anchor, facing the sand and serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. Callaloo Beach Bar & Grill is the more casual option, with St Lucian dishes and the sort of food you can happily eat in swimwear. The fish is excellent – fresh, simply cooked and sensibly left alone. Better still is the jerk chicken: smoky, sticky and hot enough to silence the table.
Turquoise Beach Bar handles lighter bites and drinks by the sea, while in the evening Suru shifts things towards Asian-fusion and was the best meal of my stay. Service can occasionally run on island time, but that felt fairly easy to forgive with a cold Piton in hand. For nights when leaving the suite feels entirely unnecessary, a private chef can cook in your kitchen, or room service will set dinner up on the terrace.
The Spa
The spa sits discreetly above the lobby and turns out to be much larger than its entrance suggests, with eight treatment rooms, steam rooms, outdoor hydrotherapy terraces, a salon and a substantial weekly programme of classes. Alongside massages and facials is an unusually thoughtful range of treatments focusing on menopause, hormonal health and postpartum recovery, plus specialist care for guests undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment.
My massage was excellent: firm, intuitive and unnervingly accurate about exactly where I’d been storing tension. I picked out Pilates and yoga from a varied schedule – both were equally well taught, the latter ending in a sound bath, and both substantial enough that regular practitioners need not resign themselves to an hour of decorative holiday stretching.
The Little Extras
Butler service comes with selected suites and covers restaurant reservations, excursions and unpacking; babysitting and in-suite dining can also be arranged. The kids’ club takes children aged four to 12, while tweens and teenagers have their own programme. Staff are genuinely warm with children and remarkably unfazed by the small wake of chaos that tends to accompany them.
Turndown became an unexpected highlight. Little morsels appeared each evening – fudgy chocolate truffles, homemade cookies, spiced herbal tea – and somehow, despite scampering back to the room full to the brim after dinner, I always found space for them. The pantry service will also stock the kitchen before you arrive, from oat milk and peanut butter to the exact cereal your child has decided is the only acceptable breakfast. Anyone who has ever attempted to negotiate a restaurant menu with a tired six-year-old may consider this one of the resort’s more convincing luxuries. There is a washer-dryer in every suite too. Spectacularly unsexy on paper; a stroke of genius after a week of factor 50, damp swimwear and accidentally importing half the beach.
The To-Do List
The water inside Rodney Bay is calm enough for children and nervous swimmers, and the watersports centre has paddleboards, kayaks, sailing and snorkelling equipment. On land there are two floodlit tennis courts, one convertible for pickleball, plus beach volleyball and croquet.
Pigeon Island is an easy stroll away. Once a British naval base used to watch the French fleet on Martinique, it is now joined to the mainland by a causeway. Climb to the ruins of Fort Rodney and, on a clear day, you can see the island across the water. For a broader view of St Lucia, head south. Our catamaran followed the west coast towards Soufrière, the Pitons slowly revealing themselves behind the town. They are so familiar from photographs that I half expected the real things to feel oddly diminished. They didn’t.
Inland, I made chocolate from cacao at Howelton Estate 1896 before continuing south to the sulphur springs and mud baths near Soufrière. They are among St Lucia’s great attractions and possibly its least dignified: crowded, sulphurous, slippery and involving a considerable amount of communal mud. I am glad I did it. I’m equally glad there is limited photographic evidence.
Lead image: Rebecca Hope
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