Empress of the Abaco

In Baker's Bay, Bahamas, a new Palladian-style estate rises like a youthful heiress to classical island tradition.

- ZOE GOWEN

Perched high behind the dunes in Baker's Bay, Bahamas, a grande dame overlooks the Abaco Sea.

The classical coralina stone-clad house is new to the island scene, but in some ways she has been brewing for centuries. With a sandy-linen facade and a loggia in the Tuscan order, she conjures visions of fabled estates throughout the archipelago and the Caribbean (Nassau's 19th-century neoclassical governor general's home, Oscar de la Renta's Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, to name a few). And like those and others that rose up before her, she comes with a name, Windsong, and a story.

It began when the effervescent Bahamas-based decorator Amanda Lindroth received a call from an old friend, a bachelor she had met in his Duke undergrad days. He went on to buy a place in Nassau, and "then off he went and married the most enchanting woman," says Lindroth. A subsequent vacation landed the man and his new wife back in the islands, this time in Baker's Bay, a community on the slim island of Great Guana Cay. It's buffered by the rocky Atlantic beaches on its easternmost shore and the pinkish coastlines of Abaco on its western side.

The San Francisco-based pair were deeply romanced by the private enclave and who could blame them? "Even by Bahamas standards the beaches of Baker's Bay are extraordinarily beautiful," notes the designer.

The couple resolved to build their vacation home there, and they wanted Lindroth to design it.