The Cotton House review: If you're going to be the only hotel on Mustique, you better be great
The definition of pressure is running the only hotel on the Caribbean's most famous islands. Rosie Paterson checks in to find out how they're faring.
On Tuesdays, everyone on Mustique gathers in the Great Room — a glamorous, open-sided bar-cum-living room designed by Oliver Messel that is the beating heart of Cotton House hotel — for canapés and Champagne. The barmen serve up cocktails that fall just on the right side of lethal, games tables dot the space ready for the regular backgammon sessions and pictures of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, who brought the Caribbean island into the limelight, hang on the walls. It all looks like the child of a London members’ club and a Caribbean beach bar.
Glamour in private: in a duplex suite at Cotton House on Mustique, you can relive the glory days of Glenconner parties.
The Cotton House is Mustique’s only hotel and its small curve of beach is the only one with a restaurant on it (the tuna tacos are a firm favourite with everyone who stays). Swim out a little way — or launch yourself off the wooden jetty — and you’ll spy the villa of Lawrence Stroll (part-owner and executive chairman of Aston Martin and owner of Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team) to your left.
Don your snorkel, turn to the right and you’ll find yourself suspended above a coral nursery and, if your lucky, green sea turtles. This is the domain of Kate Charles, Mustique’s on-island conservation officer, who is hoping to reverse the effects of a 2023 bleaching event and 2024 hurricane.
There are currently 17 bedroom suites and cottages, arranged in an non-linear fashion throughout 13 acres of tropical gardens patrolled by non-native tortoises. I arrived in the dark and didn’t clock the animals until the following morning — when one that I’d passed off as an oval boulder hoicked itself up onto its stumpy, orange-spotted legs and waddled off across the grass in search of hibiscus flowers for breakfast. Every room has a private verandah; some even have plunge pools. Hot off the press: the already charming rooms are soon to have a makeover to bring them in line with the phenomenal new spa that opened in late 2025. Designed in beautiful homage to Messel’s original villas, it has its own ‘Great Room’ where manicure and pedicures take place, alongside a coffee station, a bamboo-lined hair salon (manned by John Vial of Salon Sloane, London SW3), several treatment rooms and a dangerously well-curated shop stocked full of treasures from Anya Hindmarch and Annoushka.
