There is a scent to Jamaica that cannot be bottled. Josef Forstmayr, the Austrian-born Managing Director of Round Hill who has called this island home for nearly four decades, knows this better than most – because he has tried. Working with Blue Mountain Aromatics, he chased the elusive perfume of night-blooming jasmine, the heady sweetness that rises after a late-afternoon thunderstorm, thick in the humid dark. “We could not copy it,” he admits, with the warm resignation of a man who has made peace with the fact that some of Jamaica’s magic simply refuses to be replicated. “It was just impossible.” That, in a way, is Round Hill in a nutshell.
A Hideaway Built for Freedom
When Jamaican entrepreneur John Pringle carved a luxury estate from a hundred-acre peninsula twenty minutes west of Montego Bay in 1953, he wasn’t building a hotel in any conventional sense. He was building a permission slip. British aristocracy and American café society were growing restless – tired of Palm Beach, tired of Cuba, tired of being watched.
Pringle, the son of an old plantation-owning family and newly married to Canadian fashion model Liz Benn, offered something different: an enclave of simple, beautifully built cottages on a private bay, surrounded by tropical forest, staffed by people from the surrounding village who knew the land. “What makes a resort is the mix of those who come and how you treat them,” Pringle said, a philosophy he lived by from the very first day.
That was always the point. Not the celebrities, not the mythology – though both arrived in abundance – but the freedom. The sense that here, on this peninsula with its whistling frogs and private beach, where villas with deep verandas open to the trade winds, everyone could find their place.
The celebrated and the powerful came and kept coming: Cole Porter, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, John F. Kennedy and Jackie, who honeymooned in Cottage 10 and returned years later – JFK to draft his inaugural address poolside at Villa 25. Over time, guests returned because it was unpressured, a place that asked little of you beyond presence.
Polishing the Jewel
Josef arrived in 1989, already a decade into a love affair with Jamaica that had begun in Port Antonio. He didn’t so much take over Round Hill as he fell for it, the way one feels compelled, a calling rather than a job. Thirty-seven years later, his passion remains, “I don’t work here. I play here,” he says. “This is my playground.”
But beneath the lightness of that statement is a determination and purposeful philosophy. “I have a very important motto that defines all things Round Hill,” he explains. “Timeless elegance, understated luxury, warm Jamaican heart.” These are not decorative words. They are the lens through which every decision must pass. The look and feel of a room, the level of service, the art on the walls, the furniture in the villas, the ingredients on the plate, the extent to which the resort remains rooted in its community. It helps that Round Hill has an extraordinary collaborator in Ralph Lauren, a guest first, then an owner. He bought his first villa in 1985 and has shaped the resort’s aesthetic ever since. His influence is present in the bamboo beds designed for Round Hill and built locally; in the mahogany and white-on-white palette; in the ceiling fans that actually cool the air. Everything is understated, chosen to disappear into the pleasure of being there.
“Luxury at Round Hill,” Josef says, repeating one of Pringle’s original formulations, “is living with indoor furnishings in an outdoor setting.” French doors open onto verandas. The verandas open onto the Caribbean. The Caribbean opens onto everything else.
The Man in the Turquoise Jacket
Josef speaks of one figure in particular with affection, Kingsley Blake, a living archive of Round Hill’s story. “No single person embodies the spirit of this place more fully,” he says. After more than four decades at the property, Kingsley began as a bellhop, rose to become bell captain and concierge, and is now Round Hill’s official ambassador. The turquoise jacket is iconic. So is the warmth behind it. “It is my responsibility to ensure that when people come to visit, I show them the best of what my country has to offer,” Kingsley says.
He still has the first dollar tip he ever received – from a guest in Cottage 11, in 1972. He keeps it because the details matter. He met John F. Kennedy when he was still a senator. He watched Ralph Lauren’s children grow up. Ralph Lauren’s daughter, partly raised at Round Hill, named her son after him. Asked about this, Kingsley simply smiles. He has always known which stories to tell, which ones to hold.
Josef puts it simply, “In the end, it’s always the people. The staff is our secret sauce.” Round Hill’s continuity lives in those relationships. Kingsley’s villa tours, his weekly presence at the manager’s cocktail party, his particular genius for making a first-time guest feel like a returning one: this is the art that cannot be taught, only cultivated over decades of lived experience.
Into the Hills
Josef’s other great gift to guests is of a more physical nature. Every Sunday morning at 6:30, if you appear in the lobby in decent shoes, you can join him. Not on a tour. Not an excursion. A hike – eight to ten miles through the interior, through farming communities and bamboo forests, past hidden waterfalls and up to mountaintops that look out over the western range. He tells the story of a farmer up in those hills who, after a category-five hurricane had knocked out power across the parish, used his mobile phone to order iced tea from a friend further down the mountain and had it delivered by motorbike. They were on a summit, thirsty and sun-struck, desperate for something cold, and the iced tea arrived. “That’s the kind of resourcefulness,” Josef says, still quietly delighted, “that people come up with.”
It is exactly this – the farmer with the phone, the whistling frogs, the jasmine after the rain, the communities that pick up the pieces faster than anyone expects – that keeps Josef, now a dual Austrian-Jamaican citizen and the Austrian Consul General for Jamaica, rooted here. “I can never claim to be Jamaican,” he says with characteristic honesty. “But emotionally? I am Jamaican.” He reads widely on the island’s history, recommending Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor to visitors – balanced by his perennial favourite, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which continually renews his love of language.
Through its charitable arm, Round Hill supports those who fall between the cracks of the social system, while investing in the next generation through scholarships and culinary training, enabling young talent to return with the skills to elevate what Jamaica already has. “The food here goes far beyond jerk chicken,” he says. “Jamaica has some of the best fresh fruits, vegetables and spices in the world. We are now taking that to the next level.”
The Spirit of the Place
Children who grew up here bring their own children. Families who once met across a beach now share dinners at the New Year’s Eve Ball – where, slowly but surely, a new generation has started arriving in white dinner jackets, wanting to dress up, wanting to celebrate a world that moves at a different pace. The loyalty is not manufactured. It is the natural consequence of a place that remembers you.
“I don’t have to do anything anymore,” Josef says, with the contentment of a man who has built something that no longer needs him to hold it up. “I just walk around and touch a little bit here, a little bit there. Everybody now is in the spirit of Round Hill.”
That spirit is harder to define than a philosophy, and more durable than any design. It lives in doors thrown open to the sea, in silver laid on sand beneath torchlight, in the iced tea that arrives by motorbike at the top of a mountain. John Pringle built Round Hill Hotel & Villas for people who wanted to be free. Seventy years later, it remains as a place where Jamaica’s magic remains, unmistakably, in the air.
