Stunning modernist villas built over cascading waterfalls, set in the lush tropical landscape of Jamaica. The houses feature bold concrete cantilevers extending over the…

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Jamaica became the richest colony in the British empire — a machine for producing sugar built on the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. The great houses that rose on the plantation hills were testaments not merely to architectural ambition but to the human cost of an economy that defined wealth and obscured suffering in equal measure.

The English seizure of Jamaica in 1655 unleashed forces that would transform the island’s landscape, society and economy within a single generation — replacing the modest Spanish pastoral colony with the beginnings of one of the most brutal and profitable plantation systems the world had ever seen.

In the century and a half between Columbus’s landing and the English conquest, Spain built Jamaica’s first European towns, introduced the crops and livestock that would define the island’s economy, and — in the process — erased one civilization while laying the uncertain foundations of another.

Long before Europeans sighted the green hills of Xaymaca, an indigenous civilization had already shaped Jamaica’s landscape — building homes in harmony with the land, establishing communities along rivers and coasts, and cultivating a relationship with the island’s soil that would leave traces even in a world that tried to erase them.

Rose Hall Great House once commanded 6,600 acres of sugar-rich Jamaican land. Georgian symmetry met tropical heat in Jamaica’s plantation manor design.…