SEPTEMBER 3, 1992 – David Bowie became the first person in four years to appear on the cover of Architectural Digest when the magazine published an article about his home on the Island of Mustique. His Indonesian-inspired refuge, built in 1989 on a hillside facing Britannia Bay, was Bowie’s tranquil getaway. “My ambition is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever and then I’ll be able to spend the entire year on the island,” he said inside the issue. “It’s a whim personified,” said Bowie. “I love a good cliché, and this house for me is just the most delightful cliché.”Jagger, he explains, came to Mustique via Princess Margaret. “Mick had been with that crowd for quite some time. He knew them all through the sixties. The Stones were of course the house band for all the coming-out parties in the sixties. ‘Let’s get the Rolling Stones! Daddy, can we have the Rolling Stones?’ ‘Well, tell them to wash before they come.’ That sort of thing. So he moved in those circles at a very young age… Frankly, it was quite odd. I went down to spend a couple of days with Mick and Jerry in their house, and while waiting for the boat—I was going to take a trip up and down the Caribbean and it never happened because the propeller fell out or something—I was stranded. And I just went scouting one day, having nothing better to do, there being little else to do there, and I came across this area of land attached to Arne Hasselqvist’s. And we talked about it, and I thought, Why not?”
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