Once On This Island

They arrived by chance and turned a lush paradise into a living canvas. Move in with the Mardens at their EXCLUSIVE BOHEMIA in the jungle.

- Carl Swanson

Be careful what you wish for,” says Helen Marden, the formidable, delightfully sly wife of the revered artist Brice Marden. Helen, truth be told, seems rather like someone who has gotten everything she might want. She’s calling on the landline from their 18th-century home on Hydra, the Greek island where they have spent their summers since the early 1970s—Leonard Cohen had a place there, too—but I can hear her eyebrow arch.

She is not speaking of the Mardens’ 50th wedding anniversary this fall or Brice’s 80th birthday last month; she is wryly referring to the irony that she and her husband somehow ended up the proprietors of two bespoke inns, one in Tivoli, New York, and the other, Golden Rock, on the lush Caribbean island of Nevis (where these photographs for T&C were taken). Decades ago, before fame, before the retrospectives and the accolades, it had been Brice’s aspiration to go into hotel management. That life path hit a dead end, Helen explains, because “he couldn’t get into Cornell,” the Harvard of hospitality. This despite, she notes, a family connection there. “I tease him about it now,” she says.