St Barts... it's beyond fashion

Mandie Vere says that to get to her 'office', you go right past the swimming pool, around the sun deck, down the steps to the beach and, voila, you can't miss it. Just drop in any time.

We'd arranged to meet to talk about the hotel Isle de France, a little Eden that she and her husband Charles shelled out more than £8 million to buy on a golden stretch of sand in St Barts, the French West Indian Island that Conde Naste Traveller magazine says is not just the most fashionable island on the planet, but beyond fashion.

On St Barts' beaches, they coo, the girls change into Dior thongs to get that all-over Playboy tan, sans top, naturally, the billionaires' yachts are so big they carry choppers (Revlon boss Ron Perelman and wife Hollywood actress Ellen Barkin's monstrous wedding cake of a gin palace, Ultima Three, was displacing half the harbour the day I was there) and the boutiques in Gustavia, a baby Champs Elysées, are so chic they close when the cruise ships dock because who in Hermes, Gucci and Yves St Laurent wants cruise passengers fingering all those yummy tops and towels? Puts off the real money, heart face, the ones with the American Express black plastic.

Anna Wintour, editrix of American Vogue and the most powerful fashionista in the world, vacations here, and not only doesn't wear make-up, it's whispered, but actually removes her sinister trademark ultrablack Chanel sunglasses - intended to intimidate the rag trade and make her mysterious - and walks about just like anybody else, which apparently is big news in the perfumed garden of the designer monied.

When the desalinisation plant couldn't cope with demand recently and St Barts dried up, people washed in Badoit and Perrier. Cristal champagne is drunk with baguettes on the beach and holiday cottages come with a price tag of up to £17,000 a week, although the best, owned by New York elite like David Letterman and Diana Ross, are never actually rented. Lettuces cost £4 each just to import. This is not easyJet territory, you understand.

Mandie fits right in here. She has the look of a younger Liz Taylor in her Eddie Fisher years, and the whisky and cigarettes voice of a Fenella Fielding. Her size eight body is tanned just this side of crisp, and tomorrow Lee Radziwill, Jackie O's sister, which is as close as you can get to American royalty, checks in.

SO I go skipping past the sundeck, around the swimming pool, down the steps to the beach to Mandie's 'office' to talk about, oh, life in Valhalla after Berkshire-which, as she says, is all low-flying aircraft or low-flying golf balls, and, yes, it's quite a change to where she is now, reclining in an ice-white one-piece swimsuit on a sunbed under a very big sunshade, surrounded by books, Marlboro Lights and suntan lotion.

'Welcome to the office,' she says, arms outstretched. Big smile. 'Tough life, eh?' Fooled again. 'Well, I say this is my office, because this is where I spend most of my day. To get to the beach everybody has to come right down those steps and most of them stop to talk to me, so that way I get to know exactly what everyone is thinking, whether they're happy or not and how to fix it quickly if there are problems. Most of the time we just talk about where to go for dinner or what a beautiful day it is.'

Tomorrow Mandie is flying back to England, so the girls at the bar present her with a shopping list. Christa, an elegant, almond-skinned Isabelle Adjani lookalike, says she has been checking out the Internet and has seen some terrific belts and T-shirts on the Top Shop website.

Ironic this. These hotel girls, who have more Gallic insouciance than David 'Because I'm worth it' Ginola, look better in their £19.99 belts and specialoffer T-shirts from Top Shop in Oxford Street than all the rich women in their Calvin Klein thousand-dollar beach sarongs from Bloomingdale's.

'Oh Top Shop is terrific,' says Mandie. 'When I get back, my suitcase is so big and so heavy it needs three porters just to lift it. I can hardly get it in the plane. We have a lot of fun trying stuff on. Girly stuff, you know.' A jolly good sport is Mandie. And

T-shirts, belts and skirts isn't all she'll be bringing back next time. Her little dog will be coming, and the good news is that if she flies Air France he can sit on her lap, whereas boring old British Airways make you put the pooches in a cage in the cargo hold - so guess who's going to win Mandie's business?

The Isle de France is a delightful boutique hotel, built in the gingerbread style of the colonial Caribbean, with four airy suites, all with panoramic ocean views, and 13 garden suites set in a manicured tropical garden where the scent of gardenia fights for the attention of the senses with a rainbow of purple bougainvillea, frangipani and hibiscus.

One afternoon I spent an enchanting hour watching a hummingbird draining the honey from the soup-plate sized flowers in this little island haven, fluttering from bush to bush, beak dripping with nectar.

THE hotel is set on a wide, handsome beach at the foot of a deep wooded valley with the crashing surf taking over where the land ends. I had been here once before, several years ago, when it was owned by Patrick, the expatriate Frenchman who built it.

He was a laid-back hedonist who furnished the Isle de France with antiques he had shipped over from Paris - an individualistic, eclectic collectionof chiffoniers, secretaires and delicate 18th Century paintings.

He played Edith Piaf and Yves Montand on the CD and lovely black-and-white photographs of pride of France blue riband liners from the Fifties, such as The Normandy and (here's where the hotel gets its name) The Isle de France, adorned the halls and reception rooms.

It was a delightful, perhaps eccentric, slice of Left Bank chic in the Caribbean, but all things must change and Mandie, with her Taunton-born manager Charles Walker, have introduced a modern Nantucket-meets-St-Tropez style of harmonised simplicity. It's very vanilla and elegant - light furniture, creamy walls, the colour provided by the unexpected splash of a scarlet lampshade or the blood red flower of a ginger plant reflected back into the room by a mirror.

Sade has replaced Piaf, but the elegance remains, with a hint of period, to satisfy the traditionalists. Here a couloir (that's a corridor to you and me) lit by replica 18th Century grey carriage lights, there a mahogany chaise longue to sprawl on when the temperature rises, which it does a lot.

And the Isle de France has one of the best restaurants anywhere, not just for its food - which is heroic; try the filet de sea bass roti, pommes de terre rattes, beurre noisette aux capreset galettes de betterave (or fillet of roasted sea bass with baby saute potatoes, caper sauce and a beetroot wafer), but you could eat the view too.

Imagine blue tablecloths, gleaming-silver candlesticks and this wonderful cuisine in an intimate, airy restaurant just 20ft above a combed and groomed beach, licked by lazy surf coming in off the inkblack ocean under a night sky that gleams like diamond pins on a bed of black velvet and think what that would do for you after a hard day at the office.

But - zut alors, darlings - this celebrity idyll is under threat from the bureaucrats in Paris who want to take a tax cut from a French island which, thanks to the vagaries of history, enjoys tax-free status. If this happens, and forces a price hike, even Perelman and Puff Daddy won't be able to afford to berth their yachts in Gustavia.

Air France, it seems, is to blame, after 290 of their pilots thought it would be a good wheeze to come here for the day, open a post box and declare they were residents and not liable to hand the government their Air Miles or francs. Paris didn't think this was quite playing the game so have threatened them with the tax men.

St Barts is an eight square mile island on which nothing grows and there is no water so everything, right down to the last tomato and string Gucci bikini, has to be imported, making it très cher.

Because there is no water, there was no sugar cane, and because there was no sugar cane there was no need to import slaves, so there are almost no black people on the island.

There is also virtually no crime, bar the local gendarmerie occasionally half-heartedly ticking off nudists on Governor's beach. Well, they did it once, ordering some embarrassed tourist, clutching their hands in front of them, out of the sea for a stern ticking off. That must have been a hoot, like something out of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

It has no casinos, no McDonald's or other fast food joints, and no big airstrip to take the holiday jets, which have done so much in the last 20 years to turn much of the Caribbean from a Valhalla with sun into a long-haul Costa del Sol.

Instead, its airfield is a cricket pitch with the runway the distance between the stumps; at least that's what it looks like from the air. Only planes carrying eight passengers can touch down - certainly no jets - and landing here is famously like a ski jump.

You waft in on the 40-minute flight from Antigua in what the pilot calls a 'low stall' aircraft, which means he has to slow to the point where the engines almost cut out so he can reduce speed as he comes in low, wings waggling over hills right in front of the runway, and just above a road.

How low? Well, Mandie says she was driving on the road once when a plane was about to land and she reached out of her sunroof and touched its wheels. That may be a bit of a Mandyism, I'm not sure.

When you land there is a terrific kerrrr-unch kerr-ow on an incline that flattens out only 800 yards later, just in front of the beach. In the Eighties, Peter de Savary's plane didn't manage to stop in time and ploughed into the ocean.

Indeed, it wasn't long ago that planes landing at St Barts were forced to make two approaches: the first to clear the sheep from the meadow around the grass strip and the second to actually land.

None of this of course worries Mandie. She's been coming here for years, staying at the hotel she and her husband now own.

'We were like that man in the TV commercial,' she says. 'We liked the company so much we bought it.'

Anyway, Mandie's one of the lucky ones in life; she would sail, or fly, through anything. Don't take my word, ask her yourself. As I was saying, you can find her in her office. That's just past the swimming pool and right down the steps to the beach ...

GETTING THERE

I ALWAYS travel with Elegant Resorts because they are quite simply the best. Every detail is attended to par exellence and in Ceri Farr, their marketing director, they have an organisational genius. If Tony Blair put her in the Cabinet she would get the trains running on time.

They offer seven nights at the Isle de France from £1,865, including B&B accommodation, British Airways return flights and onward shared charter flights with Carib Aviation. They can also arrange car hire with a local agency, Constant Gumbs, who have the best range of four-wheel drives, which, believe me, with the hills in St Barts, you need.

BA domestic shuttles from Manchester and Glasgow cost from £65.

Call 01244 897999 or visit www.elegantresorts.co.uk