A year before the 1920’s gave their last, tumultuous roar, a remarkable hotel opened its doors on the south Georgia Coast, on tiny Sea Island, adjacent to St. Simons Island.

Some three-quarters of a century later, the crowds were still coming. But a few years ago the hotel’s chief executive officer, Bill Jones III, representing the fourth generation of family members to run it, decided that the time had finally arrived to make The Cloister into a truly grand hotel. After much painful deliberation, Jones acknowledged that the original building would have to go, to be replaced by a new one.

Designer Pamela Hughes’s mandate from Jones was as daunting as it was simple: “Every little corner needed to have some sort of special element,” she says. “In every place your eye might rest, something of interest or beauty.” To fulfill her mission, she used elements of widely disparate origin. Many of the hotel’s trims were custom-designed and crafted in Portugal or England. Most of the fabrics were imported. And under the auspices of her friend, rug specialist George Jevremovic, more than 650 area rugs were custom-designed and woven in villages throughout Turkey. “Nowhere in the world will you see a collection like this,” she says, adding that it seemed as if “all of Turkey knew about The Cloister.”