Realizing her Jamaican dream
Torontonian returns to the island to open a new inn,
What I remember most from my first trip to Jamaica when I was six years old was driving around Montego Bay in a Holiday Inn-chartered taxi with my parents and my sister, stopping for beef patties at a roadside jerk shack and visiting waterfalls that looked like the ones I’d seen in 1980s shampoo commercials. I’ve returned to the island a couple of times since as an adult — once, memorably, to stay at the ’53-built, Ralph Lauren-designed Round Hill Hotel and Villas, where Rupert Everett happened to be drifting elegantly along the property’s ribbon of golden beach as white clouds sailed like Oxford cloth through Wedgewood blue skies. But never, on those visits, did I ever freely wander off the hotel grounds. “The kind of person who will come and stay at our inn will want to immerse themselves in the feeling of the island,” Andria Boyd tells me about the North Coast property she and her husband, Chris Saunders, are working to build from the ground up, which is slated to open in about six months. “You won’t be hemmed in behind the gates of a property.” Though the inn is still nameless — Boyd is toying with Casa Bosa, marrying the couples’ last names — the vision is clear: The white-walled and luminous rooms will tend more toward the modern, with pale floors and washed linens. (Four will even have fully equipped kitchens.) And, if the dream for the inn is that it will feel like a fresh, tropical home for its guests, it’s also a homecoming for Boyd, who moved back to Jamaica last fall. Boyd was born in Jamaica and moved to Calgary with her family when she was five years old. “It doesn’t matter when I left: It’s who I am,” she says. “In Jamaica, they call me ‘Foreigner,’ but I am Jamaican more than I am anything else.” Boyd moved from Calgary to Toronto in the early aughts, worked in management at Holt Renfrew, Club Monaco, Roots, Mendocino and most memorably Caban on Queen Street (“Caban was the best store in the world,” she says nostalgical singing ly), before opening her own boutique, Shop NYLA, in Toronto’s Rosedale in 2004, at a time when the city was overrun with big-chain retailers. The shop graduated from a 300square-foot bijou box — smaller than your average Hollywood walk-in closet — to a glossy, twostorey emporium lined with “laid-back but sharp” New York and Los Angeles-based brands. “It wasn’t about the clothing for me: It was about giving people a vibe; it was about the customer response,” says Boyd of her 16 years as a store owner. “I really just want to wear resort wear all year.” Of course, since making the decision to buy a half-acre of land steps from James Bond beach in Oracabessa, close to Shop NYLA during the pandemic and to build a palm-fringed guest house, she’ll be able to realize her sartorial goal. Her decision to pack up and move to Jamaica to open a hotel was obviously not only about getting to wear cotton voile in February. After her father died 13 years ago, Boyd resolved to spend time researching, and connecting with, her family lineage and cultural history. She learned her great grandfather Captain George Silvera was a Portuguese Jew who fled religious persecution by setting sail to Jamaica and settling in the luxuriant parish of St. Mary. “I learned about Oracabessa Bay, where GoldenEye is, and how that land once belonged to my ancestors,” she says. Famously, Ian Fleming built his vacation dream house, GoldenEye, amongst the coves, sea turtles and tropical gardens, then penned his 14 James Bond books from a plain wooden desk in a bedroom panelled with louvred windows designed to welcome in the salt air and sunshine. About his writing career, Fleming said: “Would these books have been born if I had not been in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.”
Indeed, Oracabessa Bay — where Sean Connery and Ursula Andress strolled James Bond beach in “Dr. No” — is as cinematic as ever. “This part of the island is lush and delicious. To me, this is Jamaica,” says Boyd. “It’s beaches and tropical birds
“It’s beaches and tropical birds singing so loud I can’t sleep; it’s hearing mangos drop onto the grass during the night, making that soft little thud.” ANDRIA BOYD BORN IN JAMAICA
so loud I can’t sleep; it’s hearing mangos drop onto the grass during the night, making that soft little thud, then waking up, walking out with my Blue Mountain coffee and finding a mango waiting for me to pick it up.” In fact, she delights in driving to her family’s farm in the hills to pick tropical fruit: soursop and cane, jackfruit and coconuts and Gros Michel bananas. “There are trees everywhere. You can just climb a tree and pick fruit,” she says. This delightful education in fruit strangely makes me think of a love letter Elvis Presley penned in 1975 to then-girlfriend Sheila Ryan. In it, Presley wrote: “To Sheila, Philosophy for a happy life: someone to love, something to look forward to, something to do.” As wise a philosophy for living as I’ve ever heard. With all the privations of this pandemic, it’s been a challenge for many of us to lose that something to look forward to, the particular freedom and sumptuousness of making plans. But the more I talk to Boyd, the more I’ve resolved to look forward to one day visiting Jamaica during mango season, the peak of which stretches languidly from May to July, when the hot air itself is almost as velvety and pulpy as the ripening fruit. “Mangos are everywhere: on the roads, in the neighbourhoods. You see people walking to work carrying a mango for their lunch.”
There are endless varieties of mangos, she says, referring to them all affectionately as if they’re childhood friends: “There are Julies and Blackies, Stringies and Lady Fingers.” Her favourite are the Julies, their plump cheeks the flaming pink of a sunset. “The mangos we get in Canada are an insult to the mango, but if I do buy a mango in Toronto, I buy them from Caribbean Corner in Kensington market because he has Julies. Chris and I call the place God Bless You because, whenever you buy something, they say ‘God Bless You.’ ”
The inn, Boyd assures me, perches on land lush with coconut palms and mango trees. And the couple also plan to grow their own organic produce, like heirloom tomatoes, to serve at the laid-back restaurant.
Boyd and Saunders took inspiration from their experience at Coqui Coqui’s three-room residencia in Coba, in Mexico’s Yucatan jungle, where one man, Pepo, carried their suitcases to the room, then served them lunch, then later appeared behind the reception desk. “I think about Pepo and about that experience — the intimacy of it — all the time.”
I’m now thinking about Julie mangos all the time. And Blue Mountain coffee. “Try a Blue Mountain coffee with a bit of sweetened condensed milk — there’s no looking back,” says Boyd, who, it seems, has a lot to look forward to.