Great house gallery.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: AMERICAS !Ojo!

A GRAND OLD plantation house that hosted meetings of the Barbados Legislature back in the early 1700s and later was nearly destroyed by a hurricane has been given a new lease on life as one of the eastern Caribbean's most prestigious art galleries.

The Gallery at Lancaster Great House is located in the parish of St. James, north of Bridgetown, the capital of 166-square-mile Barbados. Lancaster's modern-day savior is Roger Chubb, a former director of the London auction house Sotheby's who has been living in Barbados for the last fifteen years.

"This building belongs to an English couple, Sir Martyn and Lady Sally Arbib," Chubb told Americas during a recent tour of the grounds. "They bought the property in 1999 with the intention of creating a center for the arts in Barbados. For various legal reasons, that didn't happen. So they asked me to orchestrate a number of charitable events using this house. That's how this whole organization evolved."

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The building's foundations were constructed around 1780, said Chubb. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Lancaster House sat in the middle of a prosperous 484-acre sugar plantation that employed as many as 232 slaves. It was badly damaged in the hurricane of 1831 when the third story was blown off. Since then, it's been sold numerous times to satisfy debts. Its grounds have shrunk to three and a half acres, which will soon become a golf course.

"That's fine by me, because that way it stays green and won't be developed," said Chubb, who before coming to Barbados restored Sutton Place, a 775-acre Tudor estate, for Stanley Seeger and helped the reclusive American multimillionaire get his art collection together. "What I Find really appalling is the mass of high-density holiday developments in Barbados, which do very little for the island's economy."

Chubb's company leases the property from the Arbibs, who generously pay for the upkeep of the building and grounds. The price tag for restoring Lancaster House to its former grandeur was around US$250,000, and it costs just US$500 a day to keep it open.

"I would like it to become a major tourist attraction,"...