A Nautical Villa on Panama’s Pacific Coast
(nytimes.com) It is a 90-minute drive from Panama City to the burgeoning resort town of San Carlos where, at the end of a bumpy road, a set of gates suddenly swing open to reveal a small seaside villa with painted terra-cotta walls decorated with ship’s wheels and other nautical paraphernalia.
The owner, John Bamber, modestly describes it as his beach house, but the villa is much larger than it first appears. There are actually two houses nestled on 12 acres, high above the garden paths that lead down to the Pacific Ocean.
The villa is a shrine to maritime life — not surprising given that Mr. Bamber is the chief executive of the shipping firm Wilford& McKay, which handles 25 percent of the 16,000 ships that pass through the Panama Canal every year.
The windows are fashioned from portholes — square, round and oblong — including some salvaged from the Indian coastal town of Alang, a giant ship-breaking yard that he has visited twice. “People would find portholes from sunken vessels and ask me if I wanted to buy them,” said Mr. Bamber, 58, who was born in Preston, England, and has worked in Panama since 1971. “ Now I have 75 of them.”
The nautical theme extends to the interiors, which are filled with brass bells, name plates, hurricane lamps, diving helmets and sextants. “I have scores of tread plates taken from British Navy ships,” he said. “Each ship had one on the deck at the top of the gangplank so that when sailors came back drunk from shore leave, they could look down and know where they were.”
There is even a propeller, salvaged from a 1940s German ship that is used as a table base. “It weighs 2,000 pounds and it took about 22 guys to put it into place,” Mr. Bamber said. “I gave them a crate of beer for their efforts.”
Mr. Bamber and his wife, Nathalia, began looking in the mid-1990s for a weekend home to which they could ultimately retire. They were drawn to San Carlos, one of the resort towns springing up on the Pacific coast of Panama with condo developments, gated communities and high-rise blocks of apartments.
“There was nothing here, just woodland,” Mr. Bamber said, who first heard about the land from a neighbor in Panama City, where he lives in a new high-rise building.
Working with an architect who specializes in beach houses, Mr. Bamber sketched out his vision. “I asked the architect for a building that would be 12 meters by 12 — nothing fancy,” he said. “Then I decided I wanted more rooms but we could not see how to make that work as one home. So I told him to build another 12-by-12 house, 50 feet or so away, and we would blend the two buildings together.”
“I had sleepless nights trying to work out how to do that,” he added.
The solution was a stone patio that weaves from one front door to the other, through a bar area with a wooden roof hung with fishing nets and past a curving pool flecked with tiles of blue, yellow and green.
The first house, which is used for guests, is a two-story stucco structure painted dark red with a terra-cotta roof, rough stone pillars and arched doorways that face the sea. The 1,550-square-foot space has two bedrooms, each with stone-walled bathrooms, a steely modern kitchen and a dining room.
The living area is in the second house, which is roughly the same shape and size as the first, and has a balcony with blue and white balustrades overlooking the ocean. The sunny entry hall is dominated by a wide stairway leading to the spacious master bedroom and a guest room, both with a bathroom.
Mr. Bamber would not disclose the price of the 12-acre lot or the construction costs. But a nearby lot that is roughly 37 acres in size and eight minutes from the beach is currently listed at $2.85 million, according to PanaEstate, an online real estate company. A half-acre lot at Vistamar, a beachfront gated community in San Carlos with a golf course and club house, is listed at $1.3 million.
Following the global real estate downturn, prices in San Carlos and Panama City have fallen in recent months. “The flipping game is long gone over here,” said Jesse Levin, the owner of Archer Group Investments, a real estate consulting firm in Panama. “There are 30,000 apartments for sale in the city with no one to buy them unless they are prepared to wait and play a long game.”
Mr. Bamber, however, said he no intention of selling or buying another property in Panama, unless you count a storage unit for his nautical artifacts. “My wife doesn’t say too much, but every time there is another package through the mail she gets a little bit antsy, “ he said. “Mind you, I might have to ease up on the collecting.”
