The Peninsula House
I’m dining by candlelight with my husband on the veranda of the Peninsula House, a gingerbread-style mansion perched atop a hill on the Dominican Republic’s north coast. It’s dusk, and from here I can watch the outline of a palmfringed bay slowly fade into the darkness. The air throbs with the high-pitched drone of crickets and the chirping of tree frogs. Behind me, in the library, a familiar melody is playing; it takes me back to earlier, gentler times. If there’s a more restful and romantic place to be, I can’t imagine it.
Cary Guy, one of the inn’s owners, has prepared an arugula and onion salad. Topped with caramelized apples and melted Camembert, it’s at once peppery and crisp, smooth and sweet. The contrast of flavors and textures reveals I’m in the hands of a master. The pleasure goes on: Fennelinfused mahi-mahi nestles under a seductive blanket of tomato concasse; tropical fruits flirt with sultry cardamom ice cream. This is my kind of food.
The Peninsula House, which opened in 2008, is the creation of Marie-Claude Thiebault, a French woman who resided in South Africa for many years, and Guy, an American with a background in the hospitality industry. The couple met in the late ’90s while they were living in Provence and soon discovered they shared a love of design and the creative process. They began to envision the small inn of their dreams. It would be luxurious but not stuffy, a place where guests could enjoy 5-star services in a place that felt like home.
But where should they build it? The Mediterranean? Turkey? Argentina? A friend suggested the Dominican Republic, so they made a visit. The Caribbean side, they decided, was overdeveloped—too “fabricated” for their taste—so they went north to the less developed but beautiful Samaná Peninsula. Voila!—they had found their Eden!
The design of the house reflects the couple’s love of architecture and their world-embracing taste in art and design. The two-story mansion, with its broad wrap-around porches, encloses a colonnaded courtyard—a nod to the island’s Spanish colonial heritage. Guests naturally gravitate to the veranda to relax or dine. They’re also tempted by what’s inside: warmly lighted, salmon-hued rooms with plump sofas, gleaming wide-plank floors and geometric-patterned oriental carpets.
Upstairs, six guest rooms offer luxuries, large and small. Some you’d expect to see in any 5-star establishment—marble-tiled showers, crisp Frette linens, ice water in a silver pitcher. The memorable ones, however, are things you never knew you were missing—like the morning ritual of unlatching the French doors’ tall interior shutters to reveal a bird’s-eye view of green lawn, waving palms and shimmering sea.
The next morning after breakfast, my husband and I meet Marie-Claude, who’s dressed for a workout in a black T-shirt and shorts and shadowed by her evertrotting chihuahua, Chupito. (Spanish for “a little shot of rum.”) She’s a vivacious woman with a bright, almost mischievous, smile and a low voice that occasionally drops to a sexy whisper.
We ask what made her decide to undertake such a grand project. “I’m an adventuress,” she confesses. “Not a lot of things frighten me. But this location … it was so beautiful!”
When she and Cary started the project, the modern paved road from Santo Domingo, the island’s capital, didn’t exist. The process of building the house—which included clearing the forest, bringing in electricity and water and engineering it to withstand storms and earthquakes—took almost three years. The couple sourced electricians and plumbers from St. Barts island and tatajuba wood and mahagony from Brazil. The local carpenter, a French expat, constructed the bathroom vanities, while Dominican craftsmen made the gingerbread embellishments. All the while, the couple stayed down the hill in a small house on Playa Coson, one of the world’s most beautiful beaches. (The cottage, just five minutes from the inn, would become the inn’s “beach club,” where guests swim and lunch.)
Marie-Claude gives us a short tour of the property, and we learn that she has been collecting art since she was a child. In the public areas, we admire antique puppets from Bali and 18th- and 19th-century paintings on glass from Rajasthan. There are African masks, Burmese temple sculptures and an unusual objet d’art—a shaggy shawl that appears to be made from small scraps of paper. Marie-Claude corrects us: “No, it’s aubergine (eggplant).” Paintings range from traditional English landscapes to contemporary works collected by Cary, a painter and mixed-media artist himself. Furnishings include fine English and French antiques, as well as pieces from India, Asia and the Middle East. We linger over a Syrian card table made of finely crafted marquetry.
In the hands of an amateur, this collection might be a mash-up. But Marie-Claude has an instinct for color and space. She allows nothing to detract from the house’s architectural bones. Her design philosophy? She detests decorator-styled spaces. A house only comes alive, she says, when it reflects the personality and interests of its owners.
The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, where in 1492 Christopher Columbus made his third landfall in the New World. Later, it became a base for Spanish expansion to Central and South America.
Today, the island is known for its beach resorts, which are concentrated on the island’s southern and eastern coasts. They tend to be self-contained communities geared to well-heeled travelers who demand activities like golf, tennis or polo. We might have gone to one, but we were looking for a more “authentic” experience.
This afternoon, Marie-Claude’s son has ordered us a rental car, so we can get out and see the island. An attractive young man with a hint of a South African accent, Thomas tells us about the peninsula’s natural beauty. If we had more time, we might have booked an excursion to Los Haitises National Park, a bay with rocky cays and karst formations, mangrove swamps and caverns embellished with ancient pictographs. And if it were winter, we’d surely go whale-watching in Samaná Bay, where some 75 percent of the western Atlantic’s humpback whales come every year to mate and calve. He jokes, “It’s a combination singles bar and nursery.”
Thomas recommends we drive to the Mosquito Bar for a sundowner. The bar turns out be a shack by the beach, where a lively group of French expats are outdoors listening to a singer and guitarist. There’s plenty of rum—and no mosquitoes in sight.
On our last afternoon, we take a swim at Playa Coson, then dine on a shrimp and mango salad at the beach club. A few hours later, we are back at the Peninsula House, lying on a teak chaise, gazing into the tops of the palms. Nothing to do but listen to the woodpeckers gently tapping on the trees. We take a dip in the pool, then head to the veranda for cocktails and dinner. If there’s a more restful and romantic place to be, I can’t imagine it.