The abbey's early history reads like a Jacobean drama in its own right. Colonel Berringer built the house, but he did not keep it long. His neighbor, Sir John Yeamans, is believed to have arranged for Berringer to be poisoned, then married Berringer's widow and claimed the property as his own. Yeamans was ambitious and resourceful in ways that benefited his reputation if not his character. He introduced mahogany to Barbados and planted the imposing avenue of mahogany trees that still leads to Cherry Tree Hill, one of the most photographed approaches on the island. Under subsequent owners, St Nicholas Abbey became one of Barbados's most successful sugar plantations. Sugar was grown on the property from 1640, and processing continued on site until 1947, when the cane began to be trucked eight miles to the Portvale Sugar Factory.

The house is an act of architectural memory. Its curvilinear Dutch gables, topped with tall finials carved from coral stone, its corner chimneys, its fireplaces and walled herb garden all follow plans brought from England and faithfully reproduced in the Caribbean. The style is Jacobean, belonging to the transitional period between Tudor and Georgian architecture, and there are only three houses of this era surviving in the Western Hemisphere. Inside, the rooms hold Wedgwood pottery, Chippendale furniture, and a Chinese Chippendale staircase added in a later renovation. Cedar panelling lines the walls. The entrance portico came later as well, softening the house's originally more austere facade. Walking through these rooms, it is easy to forget the context, and that forgetting is precisely the danger.

Every piece of coral stone was cut and placed by enslaved workers. Every acre of cane was planted, tended, and harvested by enslaved workers. The sugar that made St Nicholas Abbey wealthy passed through a refinery powered by enslaved workers. For more than two hundred years, the abbey's elegance was underwritten by forced labor on a scale that is difficult to comprehend from inside its dining room. The Barbados Tourism Authority lists the property as one of the 'Seven Wonders of Barbados,' and it has attracted thousands of visitors a year, many drawn by the architecture and the rare 1930s film of plantation life that plays in the museum. That film, shot by a Cave family member, shows the rhythms of sugar production with a tourist's eye. What it does not show is how those rhythms were established and at whose expense.

Since 2006, the abbey has been owned by Barbadian architect Larry Warren, who has maintained it as a museum and working rum distillery. The property now produces its own rum, completing a circle that connects the modern craft spirit industry to the raw sugarcane that first grew here in 1640. Visitors can walk the grounds under mahogany, box, cabbage palm, silk cotton, and avocado trees. The house passed through the Cumberbatch family, then the Cave family, with Lt. Col. Stephen Cave living there from 1978 until his death in 2003. Each generation left its mark, adding rooms, updating furniture, maintaining the gardens. St Nicholas Abbey endures because people kept choosing to preserve it. The question it poses to every visitor is what, exactly, is being preserved, and whether beauty and brutality can be held in the same gaze without one erasing the other.