The Deckhouses Grand Cayman – A Case Study

You will only create the right product for your clients if you can see the world through their eyes, understand what they care about, what they aspire to, what they need, and what would make each day, each experience better.

Blessed and cursed with the highly cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and experienced clientele that my Ritz-Carlton product attracted to Cayman, we needed to come up with something unique if we were going to create an authentic luxury product that was not directly on the sands of Seven Mile Beach.

A little bit of history

This was 2006, and the impact of the Ritz-Carlton opening was beginning to be felt across all sectors of the Cayman economy. Until then, the common wisdom was those high-end products, mainly directed at buyers who did not spend their entire time here in Cayman, could only be done if directly on the beach.

Recognizing that there was so much more that Cayman had to offer and knowing firsthand, via my daily commutes by boat, just how spectacular the North Sound was and how, since Cayman is blessed with being about as flat as an island can be, many other incredible views that were not being used to create stunning developments.

The master plan of the project always envisaged a series of neighborhoods between the Sound and Seven Mile beach, all connected to and by water; the challenge was to make it somewhere that the most discerning buyer, someone who could choose to purchase anything anywhere, wanted.

So, coming off the back of the tremendous success of Exclusive Island, I decided to start a project that came to be known as The Deckhouses Grand Cayman.

The idea of The Deckhouses Grand Cayman

Having gone up on one of our larger Lull’s, a giant glorified forklift that could reach over thirty-five feet in the air, to see the view for myself, I knew the site would be the perfect canvas, large enough to create a community but small enough to make it exclusive and intimate.

But before deciding what would work, we needed to see all the other incredible options our clients could choose from so we knew what had to be better to attract them.

We knew this meant a lot more than just what else was available in Cayman; it represented the best of the best in the southern and Caribbean region.

So, as I had done with the hotel operating team before opening, I took the marketing, sales, and design team on a whirlwind tour of the best the region had to offer.

Climbing onto the chartered Gulfstream jet as we set out, a giddy and energetic crew thought they were off for a jet-set tour to live like the rich and famous. Four days, seven countries and twenty-two properties (Fran to confirm ) later, a pretty worn-out crew trooped back down the stairs to crawl home to their beds and try to absorb all they had seen.

What changed everything

But along the way, something extraordinary happened; seeing all the different ways some incredibly talented people expressed luxury, service, design, privacy, and elegance at the highest level, some common themes started to emerge.

People wanted the type of services you could only get from a five-star hotel but didn’t want all the traffic and activity that a large resort creates. They wanted their private beach but didn’t want to own a whole island to get it. They wanted the flexibility of separate buildings within their own property but didn’t want to own an entire estate or look after one.

They wanted their own private pool but also a waterfront. They wanted to be surrounded by and connected to the water with their boat, an integral part of the home, not a distant afterthought. And above all, they wanted a seamless indoor-outdoor living space that offered lots of different places to gather and lots of areas to be private.

If you could sum it all up in one example, it was Richard Branson’s Necker Island experience without having to maintain it or the price tag.

The Deckhouses Grand Cayman begins to take shape

So, while flying home, I started to sketch out just what the perfect Deckhouse home would look like, how it would capture the views, have a private owner suite, lots of indoor-outdoor space, a private beach, guest house, pool, and the boat integrated into the home. The Ritz-Carlton service platform could live outside the gate, just a phone call to get whatever your heart desires. 

By creating an entrance at the ‘second level’ we gave the prime living space both incredible views and privacy and made the beach, and guesthouse area more private and unique, making three separate levels, each with its own reason to exist, expanded the feel of the house well beyond its actual square footage.

That was all somewhat evident in that original sketch, and that sketch turned out to be pretty close to what the Deckhouses Grand Cayman eventually became, but the next challenge was how to execute in a way that both delivered on the quality but was unique enough to underpin how exceptional these homes were.

Challenges:

We also needed to get planning approval that let us build close enough to the water to make the vision for the homes work. We managed this by adjusting the parcel boundaries so that half of the canal surrounding the site was joined to the parcel, thereby moving the setback line out. Given that the canals had been made by yours truly for the overall property, it was essentially pushing property boundaries within our own backyard, but it took some explaining, and we got there in the end.

We had to look outside the standard specifications and suppliers to deliver quality and uniqueness. We ended up finding incredible woodwork and doors in Colombia, but to ensure consistent quality, we ended up sending one of our project team down to the factory to inspect every piece before it was loaded. This, and a dozen other examples, like massive glass sliding doors with no threshold, so that when opened, the deck and the living room became one open space, ended up delivering a product unlike any done in Cayman before.

A dream come true

It was a radical enough approach at the time that, as you would sadly expect, many people pushed back and said they were never going to work as we said they would, but once the finished product was there to see people embraced and even today, more than a dozen years since we finished the first ones, the Deckhouses Grand Cayman are still at the leading edge of what’s possible in Caribbean residential living.