Think Barbados, and you are more likely to think of beaches and sand and flying fish than of architecture. Yet Barbados offers not only Palladian, Jacobean and Georgian buildings, but fascinating versions of historic European styles adapted to a tropical climate. Wide verandahs and shuttered jalousie windows can be found almost ,everywhere, and houses are rarely more than three storeys high.
Architecture on the island really began to develop between the mid-points of the 18th and 19th centuries, with the new-found opulence of the sugar exporters. Georgian architecture, then the rage in Britain, was imported and adapted to the Barbadian context. The Caribbean Georgian style that resulted influenced everything from the imposing plantation houses right down to the island’s famous chattel houses.
— Ian Wisniewski
