From up high, Palm Heights is the greenest place on its stretch of Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman, the Caribbean; a racy canopy of palm trees and sea grape next to minimalist grey condominiums. Built on the plot of a former Hyatt, the 50-suite boutique hotel feels like a luxuriously bohemian outlier on Grand Cayman, a place as known for its lenient tax laws as its white-sand shorelines. When hotel founder Gabriella Khalil first saw the old property, she says, “It was very manicured. I was like, it needs to be the opposite of that.”
But the beach, like a Mondrian painting, is a composition of yellow and blue: tanned limbs sprawled on sunflower-striped towels, a turquoise ocean so bright you imagine that if you poured it into a glass and took a sip it would taste like a briny blue raspberry. Yolk-hued beach umbrellas propped up in
