Jamaican Homes That Showcase the Island's Creative History

New York Times

16-05-2025

BY THE TIME Jamaica gained independence from Britain in 1962, a number of the sugar plantation owners there had moved on, but the island remained a refuge for a certain type of English expat: literary, artistic, wealthy. The 'James Bond' author Ian Fleming and the composer and playwright Noël Coward, among others, built elegant beachside or mountaintop estates at a far remove from the nation's rising tide of Pan-African Rastafarianism.
Though Perry and Sally Henzell were born on the island to parents with British roots, they chose a different path. Perry, who died in 2006 at 70, was the son of a plantation manager. He left as a teenager to study in England and later worked for the BBC in London before returning home to help set up the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. About a decade later, he directed and produced the seminal 1972 feature 'The Harder They Come,' starring the musician and actor Jimmy Cliff, which helped bring reggae and Jamaican culture to a global audience. When he married Sally Densham, a 22-year-old farmer's daughter from Mandeville in the country's interior in 1965, she had recently returned to Jamaica from a job dressing windows at Selfridges in London. She wound up art directing and costuming 'The Harder They Come,' as well as developing an interior design practice and eventually creating Jakes Hotel, the family's ever-evolving, unassumingly stylish 32-year-old resort in Treasure Beach, on the island's southern coast. That enclave, mostly designed by Sally, is both geographically and spiritually far from the all-inclusive clamor of Negril and Montego Bay — a mélange of Jamaican, Moroccan and Indian influences, touched by the spirit of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí.
DESPITE THE COUPLE'S deep imprint on the local culture and its music industry, their greatest legacy may be the family homes Sally created over the decades. She first stumbled on the 1,800-square-foot Itopia (the name is her play on the word 'utopia'), a cut-limestone manor built in the 1660s in the hills above Runaway Bay on the northern coast, 60 miles from Kingston, the capital, soon after 'The Harder They Come' was released. At the time, Perry, Sally and their two children, Jason and Justine, were living in Kingston, in a complex that included their home, Perry's production studio and Sally's workshop. But when she saw the elegantly ramshackle three-bedroom house with a free-standing, one-bedroom annex on three and a quarter acres, she says, she 'knew at that moment it was mine.'
Built as part of the Cardiff Hall plantation, the property had fallen into near ruin; chickens and the odd goat wandered through the living room. After buying it in the early 1970s, the Henzells began making it habitable. Sally scraped back centuries of paint with a machete, to the point where the walls of the peaked-ceiling living room resembled an Abstract Expressionist canvas. 'I suddenly looked around,' says Sally, 'and said, 'Don't do more! We're living in a painting.''
They moved in in 1975, but the house wasn't wired for electricity until 1991. ('I wouldn't have wires dangling down in that venerable house. And we couldn't afford to do it properly then,' she says.) At first, running water arrived only from a single tap in the garden. Furniture came over time — an Indian metal table from Perry's family in Trinidad, a neo-Classical mahogany sideboard from Antigua, a desk once owned by Marcus Garvey, an oil painting by the Cuban artist Roberto Fabelo. The couple nurtured the garlic vines that draped the weather-stained exterior and placed vintage metal garden furniture on the porticos.
Despite its roughness, the house became a social epicenter, filled with visiting artists and musicians, among them Joe Cocker and Marianne Faithfull. Joni Mitchell spent a couple of weeks with them in the mid-1980s. 'She said, 'Would you mind if I painted your wall?'' says Sally, who provided most of the materials. She didn't have any yellow paint, so Mitchell went down to the main street, where workers were repainting the lines in the road, says Sally, and asked if she could borrow some for a mural — still visible behind the bed in the primary bedroom — of faces and Chinese characters.
For decades, Sally wrote poetry, took photographs and designed residences for clients, and Perry worked on a second film, 'No Place Like Home,' which was released only after his death. The family shuttled between Itopia and a rustic weekend cottage Sally's father had built in 1941 in secluded Treasure Beach, the closest spit of sand to the family home in Mandeville. (Alex Haley borrowed it from them to finish writing his 1976 novel, 'Roots.')
After their father died in 1991, Sally and her sister, June Gay Pringle, sold the homestead in Mandeville; Sally used the money to buy another small house on a neighboring Treasure Beach plot. Although neither she nor Perry was, she says, 'ever very good at business,' he encouraged Sally to open Jakes — named after the family's pet parrot. They added structures over the years, and Chris Blackwell, the British-born music impresario who, like the Henzells, had grown up on the island, helped them market it under his collection of Jamaican boutique lodgings, which also includes Fleming's house, GoldenEye.
After Perry's death, Jason, now 55, who runs the family business, convinced Sally it was time to build a house of her own on the Treasure Beach compound. 'It was such a wonderful, cathartic idea,' she says, 'for me, with my grief, to start again.' She named it Bohemia because Perry's ancestors had come from that region of Eastern Europe, and had the outside painted magenta. The two-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot house is decorated with her signature offhand élan, with bits of sculptural driftwood, shells, coins and beachcombed glass bottles. Stuffed with books and mementos — a small watercolor of a palm tree given to the couple by a hotel guest, posters from their films, framed black-and-white family photos — with generations of feral cats wandering about, the place reflects her own barefoot trajectory. To take advantage of the sea breezes, there are few interior walls. The main bedroom upstairs is inspired, Sally says, by her romantic vision of an opium den, with textile-covered beds and divans scattered about. (One small bed, against a whitewashed paneled wall, features a diaphanous apricot-colored printed muslin from India draped like a canopy from the ceiling.) Another room is swathed in African fabrics given to her by Blackwell, whose wife, Mary Vinson, collected them.
As the afternoon begins to fade, a guest staying in one of the Henzells' villas up the road quietly enters and crosses the living room in a bathing suit and towel. 'Just ignore me,' she says gaily as she exits toward the beach. It feels perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the house that Sally has encouraged the woman to take a shortcut through her home — the sun throwing patterns on the smooth concrete floors, a tangle of wild cats splayed out in the shadows — to reach the golden sand.