CaresAway Ocean-Front Home--贅沢な家族生活

About the Owners and our Builders
We are Mike and Sallie. We decided we wanted to have a place in Eleuthera about seven years ago. We were determined to find a house where someone had already worked out the kinks and we could just move in and enjoy the beauty of Eleuthera. However, after about a year of looking, we gave up that quest and began to consider buying property and building—at least Mike did (Sallie was a harder sell!). We are retired business execs more at home with a briefcase in Manhattan than with a hammer in Eleuthera, a rather different island. Then while we were living in Oxford, England, our Eleuthera realtor called and said he had a beautiful property on a to-die-for beach. Mike flew back and checked things out in a grand total of five hours before being forced to get back on a plane to Miami to avoid a big hurricane that had rather suddenly changed course and was heading straight for Eleuthera. So much for due diligence.

We proceeded to get a local architect, John McCarty, to design a house based on Mike’s preliminary drawings of what we thought we wanted. John not only contributed to the final design but also gave us our first lesson in Bahamas-time. That Manhattan connection made us slow learners, but many months later we had plans that we could use to interview builders and an only slightly better notion of the island time thing.

Several builders talked with us about building the house. It was fun getting to meet them, and we learned a bit about building on the Bahamian “out islands.” Jason Thompson, Teddy Petty, and Mark Kemp all gave us time and ideas, and we really liked them all. However, in the end we chose Whels Construction. Whels is the brainchild of Wallace Sineus and his brothers Elain and Leslie. They are all really fine craftsmen—and great company.