“What does a hotel with a missing wall do when it rains?”  This was the question I posed to owners, Nick and Karolin Troubetzkoy, over dinner at their remarkable resort, Jade Mountain.

Surprisingly, the answer is pretty straightforward.  “Use waterproof furnishings,” Karolin says. “Everything at Jade Mountain, from the furniture to the floor tiles to the woods, is weather resistant.”

Even from hurricanes?  “The staff here are exceptionally well trained.  When we get heavy rains, everything gets pulled back to the rear of the sanctuaries and bagged.  We lost some ceiling fan blades once but that’s about it,” says Nick, the gifted architect behind Jade Mountain’s design.

Although it was not part of the plan, Jade Mountain was tested early in its infancy.  Shortly after opening, St. Lucia was rocked by a 7.3 magnitude quake in 2007.  It just so happened that Jade Mountain’s engineers were on site working on an unrelated project during the event.  As people nervously held on to anything they could, Karolin recalls seeing broad grins on the faces of her engineers as they watched the resort’s unique structure shrug off the buckling earth and emerge with absolutely no damage.  “The only thing we lost was a great deal of water from our pools,” Nick recalls.  “The entire face of the resort turned into a giant waterfall as our in-room pools spilled over the side.”

Will the wonders of Jade Mounatin ever cease?