Inside the Caribbean Villa Princess Margaret Was Forced To Build Herself

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Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, owned exactly one piece of property in her entire seventy-one years — a villa called Les Jolies Eaux on the remote Caribbean island of Mustique, designed by theatrical genius Oliver Messel and gifted to her as a plot of land by the eccentric Colin Tennant. This full-length documentary traces the rooms, the relationships, and the decades of heartbreak that drove a princess to build the only home she ever owned on a headland at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length episodes on architecture and wealthy family history "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of Princess Margaret's existence that only fully reveals itself when you look at a deed of sale for a house on a Caribbean speck of land called Mustique. The younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, a woman who spent her entire life in palaces, who was waited upon by footmen and ladies-in-waiting and household staff from the day she was born to the day she died, owned, in the whole course of her seventy-one years, exactly one piece of property. Not Kensington Palace, which was allocated to her by the Crown and could be withdrawn at the Crown's discretion. Not a country estate, which she never possessed. Not a flat in Mayfair, which she could not have afforded on the income the state provided for her official duties. One house, on ten acres, on a remote island in the eastern Caribbean, eighteen miles south of St. Vincent, ringed by sea on every side. She called it Les Jolies Eaux, the Beautiful Waters, and she once described it as "the only square inch in the world I own." That sentence, stripped of its royal trimmings, is the saddest and most extraordinary thing a British princess of the twentieth century ever said about herself, because everything else, the palaces, the jewels, the cars, the staff, was borrowed, inherited, or funded by the state, and only this house, this single-story white compound of low-slung tropical pavilions perched on the southernmost tip of an island that most of Britain had never heard of, was genuinely hers. Today, we trace the rooms, the relationships, and the decades of heartbreak that drove a princess to build the only home she ever owned on a headland at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. Inside the Caribbean Villa Princess Margaret Was Forced To Build Herself Chapter One: The Man Who Bought an Island for the Price of a House The story of Les Jolies Eaux begins not with Margaret but with a wildly eccentric Scottish aristocrat named Colin Christopher Paget Tennant, heir to the Glenconner barony and one of the most flamboyant personalities ever to orbit the British royal family. In the mid-1950s, while touring his family's inherited properties in Trinidad, Tennant heard that an almost entirely undeveloped island in the Grenadines chain was for sale, cabled his father requesting permission to buy it for £45,000, and with characteristic impulsiveness sealed the deal without having set foot on the property, a detail his wife Lady Anne would later recount with evident wonder. The island was called Mustique, a corruption of the French word for mosquito, which gave a reasonably accurate first impression of what awaited the new owner. It measured roughly four kilometres by two kilometres, small enough to walk end to end in an afternoon, and its few hundred inhabitants lived in tin huts, scraping a living from fishing and what remained of the island's once-profitable cotton trade. There was no electricity, no mains drainage, no running water, and the landscape was a mixture of scrubland, wild feral cows, jungle, and the remnants of an eighteenth-century plantation system whose economic purpose had collapsed decades earlier. The one surviving substantial structure, an old plantation house called the Great House, was in a state of serious disrepair. A 1958 report had described Mustique as "a desolate island covered in jungle, scrub, and cactus," and the description remained accurate in every particular.