King of the Realm
Escaping to your own private island is perhaps the ultimate default fantasy. The dream of a Neverland where quotidian rules dissolve in the tropical sun has long held universal appeal, even before the Covid-19 pandemic instilled a fear of human proximity. It’s an almost primal yearning, one that has infiltrated high culture and low, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to reality TV’s Temptation Island.
Until recently, the possession of one’s very own sea-fringed pseudo-kingdom remained, for most of us, a pipe dream. But now that isolation has taken on the urgency of a government mandate, and the bonds that tie us to physical workplaces are disintegrating, more and more people are considering whether owning an idyllic rock somewhere is less fantastical and more fundamental. The word “isolation,” after all, comes from the Latin insula, which means island.
“Nobody needs an island. It is fundamentally an idea: that of the Englishman in his castle.”
Two years ago, when Edward de Mallet Morgan, a broker for Knight Frank’s super-prime international residential division, first sent out details for Little Pipe Cay, an $85 million private island in the Bahamas, the response was lukewarm. “They couldn’t justify the management costs for the amount of time they would use it,” he says of potential buyers pre-pandemic. “Now that we can all work from home, the genie is out of the bottle. All of a sudden, a private island seems justifiable.” Inquiries have increased at least five-fold since January.
