Jumby Bay Island

Updated 10•16•14


We got involved with Jumby Bay in 1983, when the owner at that time asked us to look at this Island he owned two miles off Antigua and make some recommendations at to what he could do with it. The result 27 years later is shown above. Initially there were just a couple of rundown houses, 8 odd shaped hotel bungalows, an aging generator and some small cisterns on the Island. We started with a 12 room hotel, mainly as a vehicle to get people to the Island to see the real estate. The hotel grew to 28 rooms, we then tore it down and designed a new hotel that re-opened last year. We started the real estate development with a design for some attached villas that sold for about $250,000. The first freestanding villas we designed cost between $1 and $2 million. We eventually designed about 16 villas and all the attached villas for the Island. The villas are now are selling for $15 to $20 million and above. The Island is completely self sufficient with it's own power plant, water plant and waste disposal. It has been an incredible journey. We went from having no phone service (calls had to be placed from pay phone siting in a mosquito breeding puddle on Antigua) to using our iPhones for phone calls, emails and to check drawings back at our office in Portland.

Jumby Bay is a prime example of how architecture and planning does not stay frozen in time, but must be flexible enough to evolve and change over the years.