If you have lived on Paradise Island for more than a season, you have driven past the low stone wall along the harbor road more times than you can count, glanced up at the pale arches rising above the hedges, and kept going. Most people do. The cloister at the top of the Versailles Gardens has become so familiar as scenery that almost nobody stops to ask an obvious question: how did a centuries-old French monastery end up on the quiet end of a Bahamian resort property, two minutes from the harbor?
The honest answer involves a California estate that was never finished, a customs mix-up in Brooklyn, decades in storage crates, and a two-year reconstruction job completed with no instructions and no numbered stones. It is a stranger story than the postcard version, and it is worth knowing if this is your neighborhood, because the thing you are looking at was never meant to be here at all.
The Version Everyone Tells
The short version, repeated on most visitor sites, goes like this: a wealthy American built a romantic French garden on his Bahamian estate, imported some old European stonework for atmosphere, and the result is now a popular wedding backdrop. All of that is technically true. It is also the least interesting part of the story, and it skips the part that actually explains why the cloister looks the way it does.
The wealthy American was George Huntington Hartford II, heir to the A&P grocery fortune, who bought the property from Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren around 1959, when it was still called Shangri La and the island itself was still named Hog Island. Hartford petitioned to rename it Paradise Island, hired Palm Beach architect John Volk to design a 52-room hotel and golf course, and opened the original Ocean Club in 1962. That part of the story is straightforward. The cloister is not.
A California Castle That Never Got Built
The stones at the top of the garden were not bought for the Bahamas. They were bought in 1924 by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, from Parisian art dealers, with the intention of using them as decoration for a castle he was building in California. Hearst had the disassembled cloister shipped to Brooklyn in 1925. It never made it further than that. When the marble pieces arrived and were unloaded at customs, they got mixed together with an entirely separate shipment: the disassembled remains of a Spanish Cistercian monastery called Santa Maria Real.
Hearst's fortune declined before he ever sorted the confusion out, and the jumbled collection sat in storage crates for decades. Between 1951 and 1961, ownership passed to three businessmen who used part of the material to reconstruct a Pyrenean church elsewhere, but chose not to touch the cloister pieces at all. They stayed in crates until Hartford bought them in 1961 for his new resort on Paradise Island.
Even now, sources disagree on whether the cloister dates to the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth century. That disagreement is not a research gap. It is the direct residue of a shipment nobody sorted correctly for four decades.
Two Years, No Numbers
Hartford hired architect J.J. Castremanne to put the stones back together. There was one significant problem: none of the pieces had ever been labeled or numbered when they were dismantled in France decades earlier, and by the time they reached Paradise Island, nobody alive could say with certainty which stone belonged where, or whether every stone in the crates was even from the same building.
Castremanne spent roughly two years reassembling the cloister piece by piece, working out the geometry through trial, pattern-matching, and educated guesswork rather than any surviving plan. What stands on the harbor-facing ridge today is best understood as an informed reconstruction rather than a faithful restoration. As Frommer's describes it, the finished cloister "presumably bears some similarity to the original," which is a polite way of saying that the closest thing to a blueprint was one architect's best judgment, applied stone by stone, over two years.
What You're Actually Looking At
The garden itself runs on a straight axis for roughly a quarter mile, from the low end near the resort up to the cloister at the highest point, overlooking Nassau Harbour. It is organized into seven distinct terraces, each one a step up from the last, with a stone path bordered by clipped hedges and bougainvillea carrying you toward the top.
Scattered through the terraces is a collection of thirteen bronze and stone statues that Hartford chose personally, and the choices say something about him. Among them:
- A 1928 marble figure by the British sculptor Sir William Reid Dick
- A statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt
- A statue of the explorer David Livingstone
- A statue of Napoleon Bonaparte
- A single figure titled simply "Silence," which sits near the top and gives the whole space its hushed character
None of it is native to the island. All of it was chosen and placed by one man building a private vision of European grandeur on land that had been called Hog Island a few years earlier.
Walking It, and Where You'll Get Stopped
Here is the part that actually matters if you live nearby. The gardens and cloister sit on Ocean Club property, and the practical rule is straightforward even if it is not written down anywhere official: you can see the terraces rise from the public road that runs along the harbor side, and that view is often enough to appreciate the scale of the thing. Getting close to the cloister itself, and walking the full length of the garden path, is generally treated as an amenity for resort guests. If you approach on foot from outside and get too close to the Ocean Club buildings, do not be surprised if someone politely asks you to turn around.
For residents hosting visiting family or friends who want the postcard version without the full history lesson, the practical move is simple. Point the car or the golf cart toward the harbor road, slow down near the ridge, and let your guests see the arches against the sky before you tell them the story about the crates. It tends to land better in that order.
The garden has also picked up a reputation beyond its own footpaths. The cloister appears in the 1965 Bond film Thunderball and in the Beatles' film Help! from the same year, and the Ocean Club's Martini Bar, a short walk from the garden's lower terrace, was used in 2006's Casino Royale. None of that changes what the stones actually are. It just means the reconstruction has been photographed more than most buildings twice its size.
The Story Worth Keeping
Most of what gets written about the Versailles Gardens treats it as decoration, a pretty backdrop that happens to sit on expensive real estate. That framing misses the more useful fact, which is that the cloister is a monument to a very specific kind of confusion: one collector's unfinished ambition, a customs error nobody caught for decades, and a second collector's willingness to finish the job with guesswork instead of a plan. That is not a story most neighbors know, even the ones who drive past it every week.
If you already live on Paradise Island, you know the harbor road, you know the gates, and you have probably already had a Bond-movie conversation at a dinner party without knowing the mismatched provenance behind it. Now you have the rest of it.
The Hillier Team spends as much time learning the small histories of these neighborhoods as we do the market inside them, because the two are rarely separate. If you are curious about another corner of Paradise Island, Lyford Cay, Old Fort Bay, or Albany, or you would simply like a second opinion on what your own property is worth in today's market, reach out to The Hillier Team. We are glad to talk, whether or not a transaction is anywhere in the picture.
