Ralph’s Jamaican Retreat

When he was a boy in the Bronx, Ralph Lauren fell in love. But he had no money for the object of his affection, a pair of blue suede shoes in the window of a store he passed on his way home from school. Now Lauren, who has persuaded much of the globe to buy his idea of the good life, can afford a pile of blue suede shoes as high as Mount Everest— and anything else he wants. His company, Polo Ralph Lauren, has nearly 300 stores around the world and sales of $11 billion. “What I do is about living,” he writes in Ralph Lauren, a profusely illustrated book celebrating his company's 40th anniversary. “It's about living the best life you can.”

“I love places that transform us,” he says. He and his wife, Ricky, have five moodaltering homes, each with a different purpose. There is the apartment in Manhattan and two houses not far away: a beach house in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, and an estate in Bedford, an hour north of New York City. There are also two more distant places: a ranch in Colorado and a two-house retreat in the posh Round Hill resort, near Montego Bay on Jamaica.

“Colorado is for enjoying the land,” says Lauren, and there, amid more than 15,000 acres, he and his athletic family—the Laurens have three grown children, two sons and a daughter—stretch their muscles, hiking and riding horses. Jamaica, by contrast, is for relaxing, for lying on the land—or on a hammock on the land. “I live a very hectic life,” says Lauren, “and I'm busy all the time. In Jamaica I have no obligations. It's very serene, a different world, far from everything.”

The Laurens bought their first house on Jamaica—High Rock is its name—well over 20 years ago. Set on the highest point of the Round Hill resort, which consists of a small hotel and 29 villas on a peninsula, the house was built in the early 1950s by Clarence Dillon, the head of one of Wall Street's most important investment banks. F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., who designed Miami's Italianate Villa Vizcaya, was the architect, and though Hoffman gave it what Lauren calls “beautiful bones,” High Rock was otherwise downright forbidding when the Laurens first saw it.

“At one point it had been a wonderful house,” says Lauren, “but it had become dark, dreary and closed up, something out of yesterday. It wasn't sunny or joyous. The beautiful mahogany shutters had been painted battleship gray, and the hardware was nonexistent. The house looked like a hospital. We set out to bring it back to what we thought it should be. We put moldings on the walls, and we gave it a definition and an elegance it might once have had—or never had. We put the flavor into it.”

Dillon's tiny swimming pool—“It was like a bathtub,” he says—was replaced with one suitable for laps, and the Laurens added an entirely new structure, a large screening room in which they often end the evening by watching a movie. Open to the rain forest that surrounds the 20-acre property on three sides, the room also has local entertainment—the Jamaican green parrots that screech as they fly by. Here, as in other rooms, the only cooling comes from ceiling fans. “I like the sea breezes,” says Ricky Lauren, “and I think ceiling fans are kind of romantic.”

With their children growing up, the Laurens decided they needed more space, and in 1996 they bought a second house, this one right on the water, a short walk down the hill. Cottage 26, as it was called, was built by another formidable figure in the New York business world—William Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley blasted away rocks to create a site perched on the ocean, then constructed a pagoda surrounded by four bedrooms. “It was beautiful before,” says Josef Forstmayr, Round Hill's managing director, “but Ralph Lauren improved it.

He expanded the terraces, and he made it appear more spacious by lifting the doors and windows by two feet and the roofline by three feet. It's now very dramatic, and it relates better to the ocean and the rocks.”

Lauren's original inspiration for his High WASP look came from browsing through old Harvard, Yale and Princeton yearbooks, and High Rock suggests that elevated style of the '40s and '50s: restrained luxury, acres of soft-spoken mahogany and an appreciation of what has come before.

“The house has an Englishness I've always liked,” he says, “an Old World elegance. I call it a jewel.”

But High Rock also reflects the Laurens' love for Jamaica, which, as Ricky Lauren writes in her own book, My Island, “has color, more vibrant and impressive than I have ever seen.” She filled her book with her own photographs of lush pink, red and orange flowers and golden sunsets, and she brings those vibrant hues to her dining table. “In the big house I have napkins and linens in bright colors, like the Jamaican flowers. I like to make the table fun and exciting.” The smaller, ocean house—the Laurens call it the White Orchid—sends a different message. “It's white and pure,” says Ricky Lauren, “and you feel as if you're on the sea—and you are.” In keeping with that watery setting, she uses nautical colors in the White Orchid: white and royal blue.

Their affection for Jamaica is not just something the Laurens talk about. Not only have they given money to various local causes, everything from the University of the West Indies to the emergency unit of a nearby hospital, but Ralph Lauren has also used the island in some of his clothing promotions, selling Jamaica to sophisticated tourists even as he is selling them his Polo shirts and shorts. “He has put his stamp of approval on Destination Jamaica,” says Forstmayr. In appreciation, the Jamaican government has bestowed on Lauren its Order of Distinction, with the rank of commander, and put his smiling face on a stamp, an honor previously given to Winston Churchill and Princess Diana.

“You should only do the things that make you happy,” Ricky Lauren writes in My Island, and that can stand as the motto for both Laurens, who actually live the life—and then some—of the impossibly attractive people in the Ralph Lauren ads. With all of that, Lauren says he still sees himself as the boy standing in front of the window with the blue suede shoes, “yearning,” he says, for “something beautiful and, timeless.” For him, however, the yearning and achieving are one and the same. Together they spell happiness.

“I live a very hectic life,” says Ralph Lauren, “and I'm busy all the time. In Jamaica I have no obligations. It's very serene, a different world, far away from everything.”