Oliver Messel was not an obvious choice to design a royal villa. He was a theatrical set designer -- one of Britain's most celebrated -- and uncle to Princess Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon. But Messel had relocated permanently to the Caribbean due to health issues that prevented long-distance travel, and he had already designed cottages and villas across Barbados. Margaret wanted a house that would blend into Mustique's landscape rather than dominate it. Messel delivered a single-story stone villa that synthesized traditional Caribbean architecture with 18th-century European influences, incorporating English Baroque elements like a convex courtyard. He designed around the existing flora, ensuring that decades-old cedar trees would enclose the property -- a practical barrier against media intrusion as much as an aesthetic choice. Glass-paneled doors and windows blurred the line between interior and exterior, framing panoramic views of two oceans. The main house, completed in 1972, accommodated ten guests across five bedrooms.

Inside Les Jolies Eaux, Messel's theatrical instincts showed in every detail. Decorative Caribbean ceramic tiles covered the floors, contrasting with bamboo furniture that Margaret imported from London -- a deliberate collision of tropical craft and metropolitan taste. Down through the terrace, Messel cultivated gardens of calla lilies, oleanders, hibiscus, and bougainvillea. The roof was designed to withstand tropical storms while channeling rainwater into catchment systems, a practical concession to island life. Large stained glass windows filtered the Caribbean light. At the center of the house hung Pietro Annigoni's portrait of the princess's sister, Queen Elizabeth II -- a reminder that even on the most remote headland in the Grenadines, the royal family was never entirely absent. Colin Tennant later reflected that Messel had "instilled the essence of the West Indies in a little cottage," adding that it gave Margaret "the greatest possible pleasure not to be reminded of the grandeur of what she was."

Margaret visited Les Jolies Eaux regularly, entertaining a rotating cast of aristocratic and Hollywood friends. It was here, through the Tennants, that she met Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior. Their affair, which began at the villa, became tabloid dynamite in 1976 when paparazzi captured photographs of the pair on Mustique. Anne Tennant, who had introduced them, later told biographers: "Heavens, what have I done?" The scandal contributed to Margaret's divorce from Lord Snowdon and fueled a British press narrative that cast her as a "royal parasite" -- a princess lounging in Caribbean luxury while the country struggled economically. The criticism was not entirely fair, but the optics of a private island villa did little to counter it. Margaret herself once said of Mustique, "this island is the only square inch in the world I own." For someone born into palaces she could occupy but never possess, the distinction clearly mattered.

In 1996, Margaret gave Les Jolies Eaux to her son, David Linley, as a wedding gift -- echoing the gesture that had brought the property into the family in the first place. Linley sold the villa in 1999 for a reported 2.4 million pounds, a decision that reportedly distressed his mother deeply. Like most properties on Mustique, Les Jolies Eaux is now available for rental, at rates between $33,000 and $47,000 per week depending on the season. The villa's afterlife in popular culture has proved nearly as vivid as its original story. Netflix's The Crown featured it prominently in its third and fourth series, with production designer Martin Childs consulting Oliver Messel's archives to recreate the interior accurately, though exterior shots ultimately used a villa in southern Spain. The BBC documentary Princess Margaret: The Rebel Royal also devoted significant attention to the Mustique years. The house Messel built to be a private retreat has become, ironically, one of the most publicly scrutinized homes in the Caribbean.