Lazing about the palm-planted oceanfront grounds of the Bahamas’ reborn Potlatch Club — the first luxury hotel to open on the long, skinny island of Eleuthera in a decade — it’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, the place looked like Angkor Wat.
Jungle vines strangled the ruins of its white-washed bungalows, all but obscuring the remains of Potlatch’s past as a 1960s and’ 70s playground for New York socials, British royals and a couple of Beatles, too.
Still, the hotel’s new owners — Caribbean-born high school friends Bruce Loshusan and Hans Febles — saw tremendous potential when they happened upon the place in 2016.
“It really was in a bad state,” Loshusan recalled. “Everything was so overgrown. But then, it opened up onto the most beautiful beach we’d ever seen. We were like, ‘Uh-oh. We’re in trouble.’ ”
Trouble because they knew they couldn’t walk away. Trouble because they knew this would be no small undertaking.
But now, after a 7-year rebuild — which resurrected the original high-ceilinged black-and-white-floored clubhouse and a cottage that’s now the spa — the 11-room boutique hotel has emerged for the enjoyment of a new generation of barefoot-chic beachgoers.
And that new generation has a fair bit of star-studded, fun-in-the-sun revelry, and intrigue, to live up to.
In 1965, a trio of New York socialites teamed up to buy 80 acres of a former pineapple plantation here. The idea was to create a ravishing but relaxing retreat for themselves and their friends, far away from the maddening crowds and the prying eyes of Manhattan.
They called their hideaway the Potlatch Club, adopting the name from a ceremonial feast of native communities in the coastal American Northwest, during which the host would distribute grand gifts — or sometimes even showily destroy their own expensive possessions — as a demonstration of wealth, with the expectation of eventual reciprocation.
The choice of the name would turn out to be something of a harbinger of the club’s downfall.
Among Potlatch’s founders were two New York debutantes of the late 1930s: Diana Adams, a fabric heiress who was married to a managing partner at a white-shoe law firm, and her friend Marie Driggs, a lesbian divorcée Daughter of the American Revolution. They had Junior League pedigrees to recommend them and, at least in Adams’ case, money to spend. Together with Driggs’ girlfriend, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, they set up camp under the palms, facing powdery sands and the turquoise and sapphire waters of the Atlantic — all a seashell’s toss from Eleuthera’s Caribbean side.
“Everyone was invited, and no one paid. It could be the wealthiest people in the country, or the world, and no one had to pay. Everyone came as friends.”
Terry Driggs, co-founder Marie Driggs’ daughter-in-law
The founders’ guests would come to include such glittering names as Greta Garbo, then-Prince Charles III and his goddaughter India Hicks, Ringo Starr and Linda and Paul McCartney, who honeymooned at Potlatch, where Paul wrote the Beatles’ song “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” on club stationery.
There was just one little problem: Many friends of the owners simply never paid their bills. Perhaps they saw the seaside accommodations as a sort of society-set potlatch, proffered as evidence of their hosts’ wealth and magnanimity. All that was missing was the eventual reciprocation.
“Everyone was invited, and no one paid,” said Terry Driggs, Marie’s daughter-in-law. “It could be the wealthiest people in the country, or the world, and no one had to pay. Everyone came as friends.”
And so, after little more than a decade, the founders sold the place. The property changed hands a few times then fell into disrepair, reclaimed by the jungle.
To reanimate the club, Loshusan and Febles brought on top-flight interiors star Amanda Lindroth, who’s based between Palm Beach and Nassau.
They hired a staff of more than 40, pulling in veterans of five-star hotels in the Caribbean and Asia, to anticipate guests’ every need at the petite spa, two bars and all-day restaurant. And while that generous spirit that inspired the club’s founders is back, there is one stark difference: Now, everyone pays their bills at checkout.
“It was all rather spooky for so long, this slightly witchy place,” says Hicks, who stopped by the hotel recently, some 50 years after her visit with her godfather, now King Charles III. “But today, Potlatch feels quite invigorated.”