How to design a seven-building estate on a private island, but make it homey    

The atmosphere surrounding Cape Stout nearly paints itself. Azure waters, warm breezes, an amphitheater that doubles as a half-basketball court, which sits steps from a private beach with easy access to a 42-foot, two-story explorer boat.    

As the newest property on Moskito Island, a 132-acre private island owned by Richard Branson (located a stone’s throw southwest of his own Necker Island) in the British Virgin Islands, Cape Stout is “not your typical place.” That’s according to Wellesley, MA-based Andra Birkerts, an interior designer tasked with creating a cohesiveness across seven buildings, seven bedrooms, a “beach barn,” crow’s nest, dining terrace, library and great room, gym and more—all spread across three acres. 

Birkerts, who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and an MFA in painting, described the five-year build and design as project as centering three words: togetherness, enthusiasm and color. After a night spent dining in the great room, floating in the pool and cheers-ing in all three of the property’s bars, we chatted via video with Birkerts to understand the many personalities of Cape Stout. 

This estate is many things—playful, grand, sprawling, moody—how did you come to conceptualize Cape Stout and then execute that?       

There were a lot of people and information throughout the five years it took to make this project happen. The client, I’ve done four other of their houses, has a large family. There are four kids, all grown, and I think the impetus for the whole place was to create a space where the family could congregate. Then it expanded into being a space appropriate for a lot of different functions and activities. Then it became about each space being interesting and not just fizzing out because the view from everywhere on the property is so spectacular. It was a chance to use color, tile, furnishings that made the inside as visually interesting as the outside. 

One of the throughlines of the property is your use of tile. It’s everywhere. Why? 

I counted 104 tiles used throughout the property. From the hand-painted terracotta Tabarka Studio Palio diamond tiles for the kitchen backsplash to the Popham Design Scarabs in the Beach Barn bathroom to the traditional Venetian tiles by Veneziantica that are unique to each of the stairs emerging from the cliffside, given the sun, the salt air, the hurricanes you can use tile on any surface and make it interesting but it’ll also last. I love that you can work with it, a little of it or a lot of it, and it has an effect. 

Let’s talk about that building, the Beach Barn. It’s a two-level room that can sleep up to 10 with two queen and three double beds. 

It was a mutually agreed upon space for young people who would hang out there and sleep there, or they’d have a game night that allowed them to have a bit of independence. The privacy levels are minimal, it’s very casual. There are curtains separating the beds and it was tricky to make sure each bed had a window and some space for personal effects. There are occasions when you just want to have more than one person in a bed. The building can hold the whole spectrum of a family. I think it’s fairly unusual. But it’s still high design. The living area downstairs features a B&B Italia Camaleonda Mario Bellini, for example. 

And you modeled that bathroom after a locker room. That’s quite cheeky, no? 

There are multiple shower stations in one large bathroom downstairs in the Beach Barn. I thought it would make sense to riff on a locker room; each of the shower rooms has different colors and tiles in order to not feel too institutional, but we felt like using primary colors would unite them.

There are a few secret destinations throughout the property that seem purpose built for younger kids, like the crow’s nest, a net suspended above the great room. How did you go about ensuring the interior design didn’t feel kitschy despite these moments?

Activating a space, where the enthusiasm piece comes in, means that you have to activate it. In the case of the crow’s nest, it was about getting in some comfortable pillows. Although I haven’t seen how it’s used, there’s another space with the same nets directly over the pool in between the kitchen and the living room. You have to be pretty nimble to get into these nets. It’s not the place for the crowd that gets dressed up for a cocktail party but again it is an interesting way to allow for two very different age groups to kind of participate with each other.

That’s a great segue to the pool. It runs underneath the great room and forms a kind of lowercase t, intersecting the property. How did you factor that architectural design into your interior design?

The owner originally said that she wanted to wake up in the morning—she’s a big swimmer—and swim to the front of the house. That was an early fantasy or wish that seemed like something that was on her mind for a long time, the ability to swim from bed to breakfast. After that, it really was an architectural issue to figure out. But then it gets into some interesting references to things like Venice, where you can kind of swim to locations around the property instead of walking there. So, again, taking the elements into consideration—like pool water maybe inside the house—and choosing fabrics wisely. It was indoor/outdoor but really taken interactively. 

One of the principals we had was to keep the exterior furniture more unified using a similar manufacturer. Whereas the interior has much more specific singular pieces. If we had a bunch of different outdoor sofas it would get chaotic, so we unified the exterior and then made the interior more specific.

The estate has a lot of little houses. It feels more like a village than a singular estate. How do you emphasize togetherness, one of your key words, when everything is so separate?  

We did not want it to feel like a hotel, with the same everything everywhere. Yes, there are unifying factors throughout the property like the exterior furniture, and a lot of the materials were reoccurring like bathroom hardware or whatever the paving was or landscape, but once you get in the door it’s less hospitality vibe, more residential approach. That’s where I excel. There’s a charm there, the fact that they all belong together but they have different characteristics. It’s a special place.