Beachshack: Tropical Building Page

St Barts Renovation:
Azu Villa

Anguilla Construction:
Guest cottage.
Tech center.
Residence.

Mary Ann's Tropical Building Page

This is the web site for the three villas that I built on Anguilla and the villa that I am renovating in St Barts (see Azu Villa Renovation Page), plus tropical construction tips and resources as well. These construction projects started in 1997, although land acquisition and architectural planning started in 1995. Every stage of the construction is recorded here.

We rent the villa in St Barts and the guest cottage in Anguilla (La Vanda) and the villa at the top of the Anguilla property (Mimosa), but we keep the beachfront house and pool for our own use. And we have created a name and web page for the overall completed property: Bellamare

For details on the main Anguilla beachfront house, visit the Residence Construction Page.

For the technology center, visit the "Clubhouse" Construction Page.

And finally, for the guest cottage, our first attempt at construction on Anguilla, visit the La Vanda Construction Page.

-- Mary Ann Green

Construction Tips

Friday, November 29, 2002 Permalink

Decorating!
We lived in the penthouse apartment above the office for several years. And we never had a chance to quite finish the interior decorating, since we were always busy building. So when we moved down to the main beach house, we took the opportunity to repaint the suite, add curtains, recover the upholstery, and add new furniture. The apartment is now available for rental by tourists (the Shoal Bay Penthouse).
Our first step was to repaint the interior walls (the exterior did not repainting because we used a stucco finish with the color built in).
Next we selected fabrics for recovering the furniture, new pillows, bed covers, curtains, etc. Our best source was Danielle B. Diffusion in St. Martin (located in the Bellevue industrial park across from Home and Tool; address ZA1 Bellevue Marigot, St Martin. ph 87.76.19). For example, here are the sofa, loveseat and ottoman, with new slipcovers and pillow covers .

Decor Specialist Stanya Peacock of Peacock Design in West End (located next to Cheddie's Carving Studio) was very helpful. She makes cushions, pillows, slipcovers and much more for hotels, resorts, villas, and restaurants. Stanya's covers have easy to operate zippers, are removable, washable, and some are even reversable! Here is a picture of Stanya.

The french windows along the water view always had curtains, but we had never added curtains for the other windows. Stanya made the new curtains from a white fabric with subtle gold highlights.

The porch was planned to have an awning, but for various technical reasons that never happened. So the large 12 x 48 space was somewhat bare. Even after adding outdoor furniture and an umbrella, it still was a little stark. So we added a dozen buttonwood plants. These will not only soften the feel of the space, but will block the wind when it is too strong. They, and the plants inside the apartment, primarily came from Anguilla Garden Center. There are pots for them, but they have not arrived yet. The lounge chairs in the picture below were found at Cheddie's in West End and the cushions at Danielle B. Diffusion again. The teak table came from Plantation Furniture in Cole Bay, St Maarten and is several years old. Rather than keep the finish oiled, we let it go grey and keep the color via a very infrequent cleaning with bleach and water.

Here is another shot of the porch, showing the umbrella and director chairs from Kobbe Design in George Hill.

Here is a shot taken from above the bathroom looking down into the living area. You can see the new bar stools (from Cheddie) in the kitchen.

Here is a shot of the dining table, with new chairs and flower pot from World Art and Antiques in The Valley (cushions by Stanya!). The table came with us from Canada and the Tansu chest is from Japan, via an antique store in San Anselmo California.

The bathroom was mostly finished, but we added some decorations as you enter the room.