Where the Famous Go to Vanish: Inside the Quiet Glamour of Mustique

“I don’t know where heaven is, but I live next door,” Basil Charles tells me one night over bites of pork slow-cooked in banana leaves. Charles is the likeness behind Basil’s Bar, a Balinese-style haunt perched over Mustique’s Britannia Bay. 

Despite its humble appearance, the open-air music venue has taken on a surprising gravitas since opening in 1976. It has hosted live performances by the likes of Bon Jovi and Mick Jagger. Everyone from Kate Moss and the Beckhams to Justin Bieber and Amy Winehouse has spent a night knocking back rum punches at Basil’s.

In 2018, Charles enlisted famed designer and friend Philippe Starck to give the old watering hole a spruce, restoring the ornate Indonesian woodwork and hanging a collection of vintage straw hats. Basil’s is the kind of place where you could trip over Tommy Hilfiger’s sandals on the deck and no one would flinch. That casual anonymity has become the island’s calling card.

Mustique’s reputation as a safe haven for the elite is baked into its origin story. Long before the age of drone surveillance and celebrity gossip accounts with millions of followers, Mustique offered a rare kind of escape—one measured not in miles but in distance from scrutiny. “Celebrities come here because they can be themselves and not worry about the cameras or newspapers,” Charles says. 

Princess Margaret was the one who truly put Mustique on the map. In 1960, she received a 10-acre plot on the island as a wedding gift from Colin Tennant, the eccentric British aristocrat and patron of the then-undeveloped Caribbean outpost.

It wasn’t just a gesture of high-born camaraderie; it was an invitation into a world operating outside the rigid architecture of royal protocol. (As her later dalliances with the much-younger Roddy Llewellyn would attest.)

Margaret commissioned her friend, the theatrical interior designer Oliver Messel, to build her villa, Les Jolies Eaux—a low-slung modernist retreat overlooking Gelliceaux Bay. With its coral stone balustrades, plantation shutters, and lily-covered pools, it became the blueprint for Mustique’s early visual language.

There, free from the press and palace courtiers, Margaret chain-smoked in caftans and hosted louche candlelit dinners with rock stars and tycoons. The house became a stage set for a different kind of royalty—one where Jagger, Bowie, and Raquel Welch were more likely to show up than any minor duke. If the island had a mythos, it was born then: a sun-drenched enclave for the scandalous, the exiled, the beautifully bored. “This was the place she found everything,” Charles says. “She was really happy here.”

The essence of privacy, not as luxury but as necessity, has remained coded into Mustique’s DNA ever since. I saw it myself after driving a buggy to Cotton House, a 17-suite hotel and the island’s social hub, for community game night, and spotted actress Emma Stone mingling with her family. No fanfare. No phones. No fuss.

“Celebrities come here because they can act like normal people,” says Roger Pritchard, managing director of The Mustique Company, which oversees island life and villa operations. Since 2008, Pritchard has managed it all—from shareholder dynamics to beach bonfires. “It’s not exactly polished, what you’d call six-star,” he says. “It’s like a village. Everybody knows each other, and we like it that way.”

Despite its status as a playground for royals, musicians, and hedge fund titans, Mustique is conspicuously un-flashy. The airport runway isn’t long enough for private jets. Landing lights are banned, so sundown is last call for arrivals. Absent are the typical ritzy beach clubs and celebrity chef restaurants. No Jacquemus pop-ups or high-fashion boutiques. When shareholders voted on expanding the runway in 2019, many showed up in ‘NO JFK’ tees.

Security here is subtle, but thorough. “You can leave your phone on the bar, and no one will touch it. But if you lose it, we’ll find it,” says Paul Hurley, director of security and aviation, who oversees a tight-knit team of ex-law enforcement and coast guardsmen. Everyone is vetted—guests, homeowners, and yacht arrivals alike—via background checks in New York and London. Privacy here is more than a perk. It’s a shared code.

The strict surveillance cultivates organic interactions. On Mustique, you might walk into Basil’s one day and find Bill Gates nonchalantly sitting at the bar. “Somebody asked me do you know that guy?” Charles recalls of the day he found the tech billionaire languishing in a chair. “I didn’t recognize him.” 

Charles first arrived to Mustique in 1971, at age 15, from nearby St. Vincent, initially working as a salesman and mechanic before landing a bartending job at the Cotton House. His mechanical skills and adaptability quickly made him indispensable, fixing equipment during the early days of unreliable electricity. A chance encounter with island owner Colin Tennant transformed his life when he perfectly prepared Tennant’s preferred rum and coke, leading to a long-standing relationship. 

He soon befriended Princess Margaret, too, even if he didn’t know it right away. “I had no idea what it should be like to meet a royal,” he says. “I was ignorant but she was a really nice person and it was kind of wonderful.”

Over the decades, Charles evolved from rum punch purveyor and trusted confidant to a key figure in Mustique’s development, witnessing its transformation from a desolate rock in the Grenadines archipelago to an exclusive refuge, all while maintaining an intimate, community-driven spirit. “I’m a famous bartender, don’t tell people,” he jokes.  

Mustique’s aura of effortlessness stems from, in reality, a lot of intention. The island functions not as a resort or gated community but as a self-contained ecosystem governed by the Mustique Company, a private limited corporation formed in 1968 by Tennant and restructured in 1988 to include homeowners as minority shareholders. That model—half idealistic, half pragmatic—ensures development is tightly regulated, with homeowners participating in decisions big and small. 

Villas now number 120 in total, and are as varied as their owners: Moroccan riads, Japanese pavilions, barefoot beach houses, and Italianate palazzos, all built to exacting standards and spread discreetly across the hills, coves, and shores. 

Italian architect Paolo Piva’s Hummingbird looks like the kind of place James Bond might disappear to after a mission. Perched dramatically above L’Ansecoy Bay with nothing but the horizon ahead, the villa’s clean lines, infinity-edge pool, and open-plan living spaces have all the ingredients for one of Bond’s glamorous getaways. All it’s missing is a speedboat moored below and a shaken martini on the terrace.

Just across the island, Marguerite finds harmony with its surrounding. Envisioned by Swiss architect Mischa Groh, it commands a tree-covered swath in Endeavour Hills. Pared-down interiors are done up in warm woods and geometric forms, with living areas flowing into a central courtyard and 180-degree wraparound terraces designed to capture both sunrise and sunset views.   

Each villa is serviced by staff, managed through the Mustique Company’s centralized system, and woven into the island’s informal social fabric. During my visit, I stayed at Serenity Bay, which lives up to its name. Wrapped in lush tropical foliage with panoramas of the surrounding Grenadines, the three-bedroom residence feels both expansive and discreet.

Designed by Paris-based interior designer Tino Zervudachi, the house favors openness over ornament—its breezy great room spills onto a sweeping terrace; bedrooms feel like private pavilions with outlooks to sea or garden.

Days unfold in gentle rhythm: a breakfast of scrambled eggs and green juice under the awning, a swim in the infinity pool, cocktail hour with a daily concoction, and a sunset dinner of local catch or filet mignon set to the soundtrack of Frank Sinatra. The team that manages Serenity Bay—a chef, gardener, housekeeper, and butler—move with practiced ease, making the villa feel less like a rental and more like a pied-à-terre.

“Some owners have been coming here for 25-plus years with the same staff because they’re like family to them,” says Pritchard. “Repeat renters often say to me, ‘Actually, the house is okay, but we love the staff,’ and come back the next year because they just get on well.”

Architecture on the island peaks in ambition at The Terraces. Situated on a 17-acre hilltop, the palatial estate fuses Palladian grandeur with Venetian decadence. Built in 1986 by architect Arne Hasselqvist—a favorite of the jet set in nearby Barbados—the property unfolds across a multitude of loggias and terraced gardens, linked by colonnades, marble staircases, and fountains. Nine principal suites, each with its own marble-clad bathroom, open to sweeping verandas. A separate guest villa, tennis court, two pools, chapel, and a series of manicured formal gardens complete the compound.

Inside, original hand-painted frescoes by French artist Jean-Claude Adenin line the walls and ceilings—mythological tableaux, trompe l’oeil columns, and cloud-drenched skies rendered in a palette of faded pastels and gold leaf.

From Pre-Raphaelite artworks and Murano chandeliers to Renaissance furniture and Greco-Roman statues, the estate feels like its cosplaying the Palace of Versailles. That is until you arrive to the retro-futuristic wing outfitted with a cinema, bar, ping-pong tables, billiards, and a sunken relaxation area—a Jetsons-style curveball that veers off-script, but offers a wondrous surprise. 

The effect is deliberately operatic, more Lake Como than West Indies, and yet entirely at home in Mustique’s architectural free-for-all. It also happens to be the most expensive property in the Caribbean’s history, on the market for a reported $200 million. 

For all its grandeur, The Terraces is subject to the same rules as any other villa—its lights dimmed at a respectable hour, its staff managed by the company, its design approved years ago by a small committee with a sharp eye for the island’s ethos. This tension between personal excess and collective restraint keeps Mustique from slipping into caricature.

Mustique’s culture reveals itself through its rituals, one of the most cherished being the beach picnics. Princess Margaret started the tradition during her early stays, and it’s still a cornerstone of social life. Each villa has its own flavor—some arrive with floral bunting, others with linen-covered tables and candlelight—but the idea is always the same: claim a stretch of sand (Lagoon, Pasture Bay, Macaroni), grill something local, and invite whoever wanders by. 

Basil’s Bar is still the scene-stealer with Wednesday ‘Jump Up’ nights and special events, such as the annual Blues Festival. The Beach Café serves grilled seafood and mezze under white umbrellas and hosts weekly cookouts, while the Veranda at Cotton House offers a more composed take on West Indian cooking. 

Even as neighboring islands like Canouan welcome mega-resorts, private airstrips, and glossy marina villages, Mustique remains a kind of anti-resort: no hotels (save for the Cotton House), no cruise ships, no branded retail. Kawasaki Mules instead of cars, week-long house parties instead of itineraries, and an operating philosophy that prizes discretion over spectacle.

The island’s soul—the one conjured by Margaret and Messel more than 60 years ago—remains intact. You can still land on the tarmac, climb into a mule, and disappear behind the bougainvillea before lunch.