Wild escape: Your own private island home
Wild beauty, splendid seclusion, cocooned by nature, your every wish fulfilled. In a hyper-paced, hyper-connected world, is a private island getaway the ideal coconut-enriched recipe for wellness? Storied may have found just the place…
here had been a storm, so it was later than he would have liked when Barry Walker last arrived at his family’s retreat on Vawa Island. It’s the last in the string of Fiji’s exquisite Yasawa Islands, that stud and skim along the gin-blue waters of the South Pacific Ocean. The boat he’d travelled in was buffeted by waves and rain and he was wet to the skin. But – as is the way out here – as suddenly as the storm came, it went, and the bruised purple sky broke open to reveal the sun, setting just at the moment his house appeared through the trees. A huge contemporary glass and steel structure, the lights were on, their reflection rippling on the water of the swimming pool.
“Arriving at dusk like that, honestly I had a tear in my eye,” he remembers. “It may as well have been a spaceship – there’s just nothing else out here. Even after all these years, I’m still so touched by what we’ve achieved. We broke the mould.”
Other people might buy a piece of land and build a traditional South Pacific type house, but not Barry. The co-founder of cannabis company Dub Bros bought a deserted forest-clad island on the edge of the world. “What little boy grows up not wanting their own Mosquito Coast?” he muses. “It sparked so many childhood dreams. We didn’t want that same white tile or ‘authentic’ thatched roof. The image we had was concrete, glass and soft wood. Lots of pillows. A place to just flop down on the couch and not care you have sand on your feet. So that’s what we built.”
As humble as he is visionary, that simple sentence belies the complexities of the project. The island – in three words from Barry: wild, magical, paradise – was pristine. So he needed to install 150,000 liters of freshwater storage, a sewerage system and power, which is currently being upgraded to solar. “A project this size? It’s insane. Totally cuckoo. Absolutely nutty. You can’t just go to Home Depot to pick up some tiles.”