As I floated across Aguayo tiles the color of mango flesh and Graceland’s butter yellows in “Priscilla,” the cinematic ambiance unfolded around me. Shuttered doors opened onto a lawn with statues of English sheep grazing serenely. My gaze traced the path of the hotel’s glittering pool, sprawling to the horizon and halting before a private beach framed by palms and fringed umbrellas.
Courtesy of Playa Grande Beach Club
Courtesy of Playa Grande Beach Club
Courtesy of Playa Grande Beach Club
“Playa Grande Beach Club began ten years ago as a private club for the owners,” said Annie Roquette, the property’s guest relations manager, recounting the history of the enchanting setting. “In 2015, it was turned into a hotel.” Sporting a fitted white tee and short flared skirt, she resembled a tall, tan, and blond Keira Knightley. Her French accent and easygoing English and Spanish lent a worldly sophistication, which I imagined blending perfectly with the hotel’s sybaritic clientele. (Notably, Playa Grande welcomes its fair share of Hollywood royalty.)
In this pastel paradise, reminiscent of a gauzy Coppola dreamscape, experiences range from mangrove boat rides to cenote swims, poolside lounging, and tennis. I spent three charmed days here in January, discovering all there is to do on the Dominican Republic’s pristine north shore.
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
Rum Jungle: “When it came time to design our property at Playa Grande, I thought not only of my great-grandparents’ triple-gabled house in Florida but also the colorful Victorians west of us in Puerto Plata and the farmhouses up in the hills with their rustic hand-carved woodwork,” interior designer Celerie Kemble wrote in her Rizzoli tome Island Whimsy. Kemble, owner of Kemble Interiors and a Palm Beach native, had a Eureka moment in the summer of 2004 upon discovering a wild swath of beachfront land. She could see a triple-gabled roof rise from it and her future children splashing in what became the pool.
Fanned around that pool are nine bungalows, five with one bedroom, one with two bedrooms, and three with three bedrooms. They are all singular and filled with treasures from Kemble’s travels. My favorite pieces were a wrought-iron, vine-crawling canopy bed in Casa Guava with an attached reading light and lily-pad surface—perfect for a pair of glasses and a book—and beastly, handcrafted masks left over from Carnaval adorning shiplap walls in various rooms.
The library is next door to the dining building, stocked with saltwater-stained beach reads and deep-sea thrillers, from a collection of sea tales called The Trough of the Sea to David Golemon’s Leviathan. Atop the library is a “Lost in Translation”-meets-Mary-Poppins aerie called the Star Bar; part fumoir, part cocktail room, and all twinkling with star-shaped copper and glass lighting fixtures.
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
Nature’s Candy: On my first day at Playa Grande Beach Club, guide Luis Caraballo took me and a small group of guests on a three-hour hike. A recent rain perfumed the jungle, and water collected in fallen Yagua bark panels. Caraballo told us that Yagua panels are used for constructing houses, but enterprising local kids also repurpose them for sledding down muddy hillsides. We climbed through the tropical paradise while snacking on foraged guava—which came in peels and tasted like coconut snow cones—and passion fruit so tart my face puckered. Two miradores (lookout points) had makeshift platforms for 180-degree views of the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of feet below, lapping onto golden shores that dissolved into a curtain of trees hiding a lush, paradisiacal world — and us.
Later that day, Roquette took us to Laguna Gri-Gri, bobbing with weather-battered red-blue-ochre boats. Our captain adopted a romantic pace as we cruised through a red mangrove forest serenaded by chittering vultures and stately, snowy egrets. Calm and relaxation washed over me, preparing me for the massage I had afterward in my bungalow’s outdoor gazebo, accompanied by the crashing surf just footsteps away.
The following afternoon, three men called “Tírate!” (“Jump in!”) from the top lip of a massive cenote. A horn blared three times, and another man emerged, dangling from a zip line that stretched across the sinkhole’s diameter. He reached the midpoint, let go, and fell about twenty feet into the water. A few minutes later, I donned some goggles and jumped into the refreshing, limestone-surrounded underground pool to marvel at the silvery fish and tangled tree roots. If Coppola had directed “The Little Mermaid,” which she almost did, I think it would have looked like this: dark, ethereal, and wickedly un-Disney.
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
A Life of Leisure: I wiled away many hours at Playa Grande Beach Club in the vintage preppy style and soft-focus look of “Virgin Suicides.” One noteworthy afternoon featured an Auyuma squash taco lunch in the fairytale latticed cabanas with resident dogs Rosie, Ranger, and Negro nosing around or sunbathing a few feet away, followed by a dip in the aqua pool.
One morning at breakfast, I spoke with a man and woman from Zurich while enjoying my papaya, banana, and almond milk batida (smoothie) and tofu scramble burrito. The Lauren Hutton-esque woman told me they were en route from a Punta Cana wedding to Santo Domingo. A friend told them they “simply must” check out Playa Grande, which aligned with what Roquette said earlier about Playa Grande being “very word-of-mouth.”
The Star Bar building glowed at dusk and beckoned us for cocktail hour. I wore faded Levi’s cutoffs, a sleeveless terracotta-red turtleneck I scored in Buenos Aires, and a vintage YSL blazer. The bartender recommended an Old Fashioned with Brugal rum, and I sipped it through a dinner of toasted plantains with salsa, Vietnamese summer rolls, and vegan chocolate ice cream that was blissfully bittersweet.
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
Courtesy of Stacy Suaya
A Breezy Escape: Eventually, I had to return to Los Angeles. The drive from Playa Grande Beach Club to Puerto Plata airport, an hour-and-a-half journey with street murals and ramshackle fruit stands, helped me transition from paradise to reality, as did my Miami layover. (Pro tip: New York, Charlotte, and Miami currently offer direct flights to Puerto Plata.)
Back in the capital of cinema, I find myself flipping through photos from the trip, each image like a potential scene for Coppola’s lens. While the darling of coming-of-age tales hasn’t filmed here yet, Roquette told us that Playa Grande recently played a role in “Leopard Skin,” directed by Sebastian Guiterrez and starring Carla Gugino.
I’ll be stirring up a rum Old Fashioned and watching the candy-hued hotel in action the first chance I get.