Entire Island

The oldest arrangement in the register and the simplest to state: one party takes the island, and nobody else is on it. Not a villa with a gate, not a wing kept back — the land itself, for the length of the stay. 38 records answer that description, and they range from four bedrooms on a Tasmanian rock to eighty acres in the Exumas with its own airstrip and a marina sized for a yacht.

The arithmetic explains more about these islands than any adjective could. Eight guests on fourteen acres at Dolphin Island; eighteen on fourteen islands at Islas Secas; thirty-two on eight hundred and fifty at Guana. Where the ratio is low the silence is real and expensive; where it rises, the island starts to behave like a small hotel that happens to have no neighbours. Reading the ratio is the fastest way to know which one you are buying.

Three arrangements hide inside the shelf and the register separates them. Some islands are only ever let whole. Some sell rooms most of the year and go exclusive on request. And some are a private island inside a working resort — Voavah, the Cheval Blanc island, the two Shebara ensembles — where the land is yours and the kitchens are across the water. The third kind is the reason a four-villa islet can carry eleven restaurants.

It is the wrong shelf for a couple. Almost every island here is priced and staffed for a group, and two people in a house built for twenty pay for the emptiness without enjoying it. Couples are better served by Little Paradises, where the smallness is the product rather than a cost.