Louche lord of Mustique’s paradise pad now a nail bar
He was the aristocracy’s supreme showman who bought Mustique and transformed its barren 1,400-acres into a Caribbean playground, giving Princess Margaret a ten- acre plot as a wedding present.
The rest of the sixties and seventies jet-set duly followed in her wake. But now, nearly a decade after his death, it’s the legacy of Colin Tennant, 3rd Lord Glenconner, which is being transformed in a manner he could not have foreseen — the conversion of one of his properties into a nail bar.
‘It’s called Over Polish,’ a local tells me from Choiseul on st Lucia, the west Indian island where Glenconner lived for the final two decades of his life.
Proprietress Petal Degazon explains that the house, once Glenconner’s, is now owned by his devoted former valet, Kent adonai, who worked for Glenconner for 26 years and was with him when he had a fatal heart attack in 2010.
‘Kent is the owner; he is my father-in-law,’ Petal tells me, adding that adonai is currently stuck in New York after flying there to bury his late mother, since when he has been prevented from returning because of coronavirus precautions. ‘The salon is just in one room,’ adds Petal, who is keen to scotch suggestions that there is any intention of dishonouring Glenconner’s memory. such was the regard in which the peer was held on the island that hundreds attended his funeral and watched as his oak coffin, adorned with his signature straw hat and a bouquet of white lilies, was borne to the village churchyard.
But family serenity was ruptured by publication of his £20 million will, in which he left all his Caribbean property to adonai. It prompted legal action by Cody Tennant — son of Glenconner’s eldest son, Charles, a one-time heroin addict who died in 1996. The action was settled six years ago, with adonai saying Cody had asked him ‘to do certain things and I will carry out his wishes’.
Perhaps that included provision of a nail bar.
Glenconner’s biographer, Nicholas Courtney, author of Lord Of The Isle: The extravagant Life and Times Of Colin Tennant, is intrigued by the development.
‘a nail bar? I think that Colin would have approved,’ he tells me. ‘ He took great pride in his appearance throughout his life — nails especially.’