Carlisle Bay
If first-rate spa treatments are an essential component of your holiday, then the optimum place to stay on Antigua is Carlisle Bay, the most style-conscious hotel on the island, with its monochrome Mary Fox Linton interiors. No tropical colour or Caribbean pastels here. Its pared-down urban interiors have a simplicity and geometry that seemed to me to be true to the island’s Georgian heritage and reminded me of some of Oliver Messel’s villas on Barbados and Mustique, with their limed rafters and high-maintenance white-on-white colour schemes. In addition to its excellent Blue Spa, where a shiatsu massage is the key to a good night’s sleep on the flight home, there’s a wonderful library, a screening room with daily films, a kids’ club, tennis courts and luxuriant gardens and mangroves to explore by canoe. Carlisle Bay (+1 268 484 0000, carlisle-bay.com) has ocean and beach balcony suites from $725 (£364) plus 10½ per cent tax and 10 per cent service.
Jumby Bay
Part of the Rosewood empire, this is a classic but upscale all-inclusive set on a 300-acre private island, 2km off the coast, and a 10-minute crossing by boat. The look and feel of the place is essentially colonial (the fine-dining restaurant is housed in an 18th-century plantation house), though inevitably there are Asian accents in the décor as well, and the junior suites are ‘arranged in a Mediterranean-style enclave’. There’s also a sanctuary for hawksbill turtles on the island at Pasture Bay Beach. Jumby Bay (+1 268 462 6000, jumbybayresort.com) has ocean-view rooms from $775 (£389) plus 10½ per cent tax and 10 per cent service.
The Copper and Lumber Store Hotel
You probably wouldn’t want to spend a whole holiday here, but if you’re sailing in these waters and fancy a night or two on land in Nelson’s Dockyard, this Georgian former store, built on the waterfront in 1789, has been immaculately restored and is elegantly furnished with antiques and naval memorabilia. Each of its 14 suites and studios is named after one of Nelson’s ships or captains at the Battle of Trafalgar. And though it feels more like a hotel you’d find in the UK than in the Caribbean, it’s not without considerable charm. The Copper and Lumber Store Hotel (+1 268 460 1058, copperandlumberhotel.com) has studios from $135 (£68) plus 10½ per cent tax and 10 per cent service.
Cocos Hotel
Hermitage Bay’s three-star sister shares the same all-inclusive ethos and is such good value, most guests try to keep it a secret. Located just south of Jolly Harbour on the west of the island, it has superb views of the coast around Lignumvitae Bay and an idyllic beach. The rooms, all with balconies, are plainly furnished (no televisions or aircon) and the bathrooms verge on the austere. But the setting is perfect, and all meals, drinks (including cocktails and wine), snorkelling and kayaks, are included. Cocos Hotel (+1 268 460 2626, cocoshotel.com) has sea-view cottages from $270 (£135) including tax and service.
Read more on Antigua in Into the great wide open.
