Postcard from Burgh Island: a slice of the 1930s, yours for £15mn

Art Deco architecture was indelibly influenced by the sleek ocean liners of the interwar period: their streamlined form, long decks, ballrooms, their sheer nautical luxury — a transatlantic aesthetic of transit between Europe (old world style and class) and New York (new world promise, technology, money and glamour).

It’s an ideal which is palpable at the Burgh Island Hotel, the eccentric, Art Deco retreat on a tiny island off the south Devon coast, but one slightly stymied by a strange transplantation of the poop deck from the HMS Ganges (1821), the Royal Navy’s last fighting sailing ship. It was scrapped nearby at Plymouth as the hotel was being built, only to be salvaged and incorporated into the restaurant.

The hotel is seeped in an English kind of modernity which struggled to let go of history.

It was built by Archibald Nettlefold, a screw and bolt manufacturer (his company became what is now GKN) and, more glamorously, a film producer, as a house for himself and his friends in 1927. According to Vlad Krupa, the hotel’s impeccably tweedy head of guest relations, Nettlefold’s hospitality began to be abused by his friends and colleagues, so, in 1929, he decided to turn the building into a hotel. There was a wartime interlude as a recovery centre for wounded RAF personnel and a postwar stretch as self-catering apartments but the hotel has endured, seemingly preserved in an immutable 1930s bubble.

This week, though, news broke of change on the horizon: the owner, Giles Fuchs, is selling up. At £15mn, the 25-bedroom hotel set in 21 acres, with staff accommodation, a separate pub, tennis court, croquet lawn and a natural seawater swimming pool, looks a bit of a steal, but presumably it is an expensive site to maintain. Fuchs says he has more than doubled turnover since 2018, and recently won planning permission for the first major renovation and extension since 1934 but, speaking to the BBC, admitted the hotel “is a demanding mistress”.

There are endless stories about who stayed here, some spurious sounding, others well-documented. It is a roll-call of 20th-century Britain, from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower (who are supposed to have met in secret here to discuss the war) to Noël Coward and the Beatles. The fondest resident though was surely Agatha Christie, who stayed at the separate beach house where she wrote, among other novels, And Then There Were None (a murder mystery set on a small island in Devon).

You can see why a writer might enjoy it here: a quiet, seductively beautiful piece of coastline, a place of dramatic, striated rocks, deep coves and gorgeous sandy beaches. Twice a day it is briefly isolated from the mainland as the tide rises. The hotel’s “sea tractor”, an odd vehicle with massive wheels and an elevated chassis, takes tourists back and forth through the shallow waves between the two, the locomotion every bit as much an attraction as the location.

This is not conventional five-star luxury; far from, say, the roughly contemporaneous Claridges. The bedrooms are decorated in a Deco-revival style (sometimes sophisticated, occasionally cheesy) and fitted out with period furniture, cocktail cabinets (sadly empty), dressing and side-tables, which adds an engaging authenticity often lacking in hotels with their relentless, bland newness. The suites, with their long, sheltered balconies, are superb.

There are occasional stunning survivals — such as the Palm Court with its stepped fountain and stained-glass dome and a ballroom with friezes and New York skyscraper-style reliefs. I liked the attenuated radiators designed (allegedly) to resemble the bolts that made the family fortune. Much of it is extensively restored, the hotel having been bombed during the war, and it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what is new and what is original. But then Art Deco was always about scenography as much as architecture, about the movies and the liners, about cars and department stores — a stage set for luxury.

The atmosphere is genteel, genial and perhaps a little lost. There are frequent murder mystery weekends, lounge bands playing three times a week, and numerous excuses for guests to dress in 1920s and 30s attire. (One of the restaurants, the Grand Ballroom, maintains a black-tie dress code.)

I associate seaside hotels with rubbery roasts and undistinguished English breakfasts. Burgh Island trashed those preconceptions. The food here is astonishingly good and the (Swiss) pastry chef would be at home in any five-star setting. There is also a 14th-century pub next door, The Pilchard Inn, which once housed the only original skull and crossbones pirate flag ever to have been unearthed (a smuggler’s island, apparently, and their ghosts, of course, still haunt it).

There are clearly things to do. When I stayed, the secluded private beach seemed to have suffered a landslide and was closed off. But I hope whoever buys it doesn’t do too much. That’d miss the point.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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