Traditional pottery-making saved from extinction. An ancient estate producing a new rum. Inventive minds fit it all together

by David Holt

Many of the most brilliant creations—the ones that connect with the world in an authentic and sustainable way—tend to be developed by people who combine a vision of the future with a deep appreciation of the past. I was reminded of this on a recent visit to two remarkable venues on the island of Barbados, a former British colony that has many Canadian connections.

Earthworks Pottery is the brainchild of Goldie Spieler, an artist from Ontario. The widow came with her young son to visit friends decades ago. Eventually she fell in love with traditional pottery-making and soon realized it was a dying craft. Revitalizing this tradition became her cause, as she puts it, and she enlisted local potters to teach her everything they knew. She opened the business in 1983.

Now her son, David, oversees a thriving business that employs 24 local people and has a reputation that has spread far beyond its hilltop location. The designs are both ancient and modern, and although the production process has been updated, the brilliance of the original craft remains.

When I was there, Goldie had just returned from Israel. She talked to me about how the business had evolved, one step at a time. But the key to the affair was her appreciation for an art that had originally come over with African slaves. All this was perhaps an introduction to St. Nicholas Abbey, a 17th-century plantation that was being carefully restored by Larry Warren, an architect who bought the place from the previous owner. The location is Cherry Tree Hill, an ancient passageway across the island once used by the ancient Arawak people.

On an island that was mainly deforested to plant sugar cane, the site is shaded by mahogany and cabbage palm trees. Founded to produce sugar, molasses, and later rum, the operation is being recreated as a home, museum, and working plantation and distillery. The Great House, following the design brought by the original English builders, includes two quite unnecessary fireplaces, a quirk that delights the current owner. It contains original furnishings collected over the centuries, including china, art, a hat collection, and a gentleman’s chair in which one can read, drink, and fall asleep, then be wheeled off to bed. There’s even a rugged 17th-century “settle,” where one can sit and take off one’s boots before entering.

“As soon as I saw the place I said, ‘Wow,’ and the pieces started to fit together in my mind,” says Warren. Today his architectural practice of designing luxury homes helps pay for the ongoing restoration. Warren has deep roots on the island. Speaking with a Bajan accent with just a hint of brogue, he comes across as both visionary and pragmatist. He lives with his family, who help with the project, in the upper floors of the house. The main floor and the carriage house behind are now museum space. The two buildings are separated by a giant 400-year-old sandbox tree whose rough exterior keeps the monkeys at bay.

“The idea is to create a sustainable future for St. Nicholas by maintaining the context,” says Warren. “Otherwise it would have been turned into condos, and its link to the traditions of the past would have been broken.” Part of his vision is to revive the traditional trades and a general ability to employ local people. “The goal is to get back to there,” he says enthusiastically. “It was a time when work was done by a person for a person.”

There’s a lot to do. In the boiling house nearby, the cane is ground by a steam mill. Next the juice is fed into giant evaporator pans in a process Atlantic Canadians will recognize as the one used to make maple syrup. The syrup is then distilled into an excellent rum. (Most rums these days are blends that are mass-produced by cutting a number of corners during production, says Warren.) Produced in a still imported from Germany, rum from St. Nicholas Abbey is then aged in oak casks and hand bottled.

Nearby sits the stone tower of the windmill that was the original power source for grinding the cane, another of Warren’s restoration plans. In fact, most of the original plantations had a windmill, and the disused towers dot the landscape of Barbados. Efforts are underway on the island to harness the wind, a massive energy source that blows almost continuously. Public reaction is mixed. As with the old plantation, not everyone appreciates the assets that had been so effectively utilized in the past.

These days Warren has his hands full with a busy architectural practice, renovating and managing the estate, and honing his chops as a distiller. The latter has become his great love, and now his ultimate goal is to focus on that and eventually leave the rest to others, including his son, Simon. For the truly inventive mind, one thing always leads to another.

David Holt is a writer and consultant on strategy and communications. He can be reached at dholt@eastlink.ca.