On Zakynthos, a bohemian British beach club grows up

On a couple of occasions I have to reach to stabilise my glass of rosé as Odyssey rolls in the wakes of other boats. The biggest, a faux pirate ship with a blaring sound system, takes hordes of tourists each morning from the south of Zakynthos, where the clubbing town of Laganas was long an outpost of Club 18-30, up to the north of the Greek island also known as Zante.

They marvel at the arches and sparkling waters of the Blue Caves and take photos of Panagiotis, a rusting trading vessel that has been shipwrecked on Navagio beach since 1980. The popular story is that smugglers had taken it and ran aground while fleeing the Greek Navy. The more likely theory on the island is that it was quietly abandoned by enterprising locals who wondered if it might become a tourist attraction.

By the time I take a seat for lunch on Odyssey, a chic 1970s former Greek caïque, or fishing boat, the daily tourist armada is heading south again. Peace and calmer waters return to this corner of the Ionian Sea. Tom Doyle, our young British captain, drops anchor and lays out Greek salad and prawns as big as tennis balls. For a few moments, my wife Jess and I forget that we have an 18-month-old playing happily ashore in the crèche.

A few days earlier, we made our own journey north from Zante’s holiday airport, joining a convoy of couples in rental cars who had arrived on the British Airways flight from London. We had one destination in mind: a peculiar family-owned beach resort that started life in 1989, when the island’s rugged north-eastern coast lacked roads or even electricity.

For a while, the Peligoni Club grew as slowly as the olive trees that bind the hills above the nearby little port of Agios Nikolaos, which faces north to the mountains of Kefalonia and east to the Peloponnese peninsula. But it is now shifting the centre of gravity slightly northwards on an island better known for the nightclubs and budget tavernas to the south. A year after the doomed Club 18-30 brand disappeared from Laganas, Zante is growing up.

Terraced sundecks lead down from the Peligoni clubhouse, with its large verandah, to a rocky cove and a teak diving board. A swimming pontoon bobs offshore and the watersports shack has dinghies, waterskis and paddle boards. At the top of the resort a eucalyptus-fringed pool has a swim-up bar. A surf-chic aesthetic runs throughout. Think Mykonos meets Salcombe.

I am staying at Halcyon, one of 70 or so villas and apartments that have spread among the hills around the club in the past three decades. The vast majority have been built for the club, sometimes by regular guests who then let them through Peligoni. They range from a romantic little olive grower’s cottage for £400 a week up to £20,000 in high season for Figari, a sprawling nine-bedroom seafront villa. All are serviced daily.

Members have in recent years included cabinet ministers, media executives and industry titans. Not that anyone cares in the club itself, where everyone pays the same for weekly membership (£350 for adults in high summer). Members can happily spend the whole day there or pop down from their villas for a quick waterski before lunch. A bohemian yet quietly professional spirit washes over the place. Bright-eyed staff are allowed to have a drink at the bar after shifts. Any airs or pretensions are checked at the driftwood gates.

Peligoni is one of those rare accidents in tourism; a success story that has evolved beyond the soulless grip of a corporate focus group or luxury consultancy. It is instead the brainchild of Vanessa Goldie, a gung-ho interior designer who sold her London flat in the early 1980s to sail for months in Greece with her new husband Johnny, who had quit a job in advertising. The couple, who had met on a houseboat in London, sailed past the northern coast before even the south had developed or the airport had arrived. There were no party pirate ships then.

“I could see it was totally bereft of roads,” Goldie, who is now in her 60s, says from her home in Hampshire. “There were just a couple of tiny stone cottages and goats and sheep, and cypresses and olive groves. I just fell in love with it.”

Soon the couple returned to the island and hitched a ride on a tractor trailer down to the stretch of coast they had admired. They had coffee with some fishermen and ended up buying a shack, which became a family home that would only acquire electricity 15 years later. They sent their children to the village school and Vanessa, who could speak Greek, immersed herself in island politics.

Localised winds were calm in the mornings and perfect for sailing in the afternoons. After a few years, the couple decided to start a little sailing club. They wondered if the lack of beaches in the north might be a problem. “If we’d bought something in the south it would be worth a lot of money now, but we just knew that the Brits or Germans would come and build there,” Goldie says. Instead, they found a plot and built a little clubhouse. They planted trees and battled with the mayor for rubbish collection. “We wanted our end of the island to stay special,” Goldie adds.

The Peligoni Club welcomed its first paying guests in 1989. For years, it remained resolutely basic. Luxury was a white plastic chair and a vaguely drinkable bottle of wine. Yet it began to attract a certain type of unshowy, posh Brit who was happy to slum it if the children were happy. Artists and city types mingled with minor aristocrats. “You’d get QCs staggering into the bar in a pair of dirty old shorts stiff with salt and be perfectly happy,” Goldie recalls. “Some nights, we’d all dance quite crazily until someone turned the music off.”

Ben Shearer remembers visiting as a 13-year-old in 1996 with his parents and little sister Anouska. “The food was still bad, the wine was undrinkable and half the boats were broken, but it was genuinely the first place we’d been as a family where we didn’t all absolutely hate each other by the end of the week,” Ben says. We are sitting on his father Ian’s favourite table on the verandah. By 2005, Vanessa and her then ex-husband were thinking about returning to Britain as their children got older. There was talk of the club closing until Ben’s father, a property developer, offered to buy it.

The Shearers planned to do as little as possible to sustain the place. But Ben, who was 18 (he’s now 33) had other ideas. After a few years of working the bar and the boats in summers away from his arts and photography degree, he took over. He’s now managing director while Anouska, 28, runs guest relations. The swimming pool and a spa went in, the plastic tables went out. The food and wine got better.

Ben set out to preserve the eccentric charm that Goldie had cultivated, while growing and becoming more sophisticated. Peligoni has also been anxious to broaden its reputation as a magnet for braying private school teens in the school holidays. The bright new crèche handily arrived in time to look after Ben’s own offspring (his wife Bella was a barmaid here when Ben was a boat boy). It’s also part of a push to lure couples not bound by school calendars.

During a week in June, the club is calm and the crèche full of toddlers whose parents are rediscovering their own company. We swim and spend time around the pool at Halcyon, which is perched on hills looking out to sea and has a garden overflowing with bougainvillea and rosemary. One night we get a babysitter and hitch a lift back to the club for dinner on long communal tables among the hibiscus and jasmine plants of the restaurant’s terrace.

As Peligoni has grown — it can support up to 385 members in high summer — the once-barren north is attracting life beyond the day-tour crowds. Increasingly smart new villas have mushroomed in the past couple of years, many built speculatively to join Peligoni’s books. The Emir of Qatar is rumoured to have bought a chunk of the island’s northern tip, with as yet undisclosed plans to build. Close to Agios Nikolaos, developers from Laganas have built a vast new villa with just five bedrooms.

“For years everyone dismissed this part of the island but now there is the perception that there’s a lot of money to be made up here,” Ben says. “But these guys wanted £14,000 a week and I said, nobody is going to pay that for five bedrooms.” The club might have grown up, but it clings to its founding spirit of modesty. “People who treat it like a 5-star resort we don’t encourage to come back,” Shearer adds.

Not that Peligoni is afraid of money, of course. As Ben talks, an impossibly sleek yacht is at anchor offshore, not far from where Odyssey is now moored. That morning, I swam out to it and squinted in the fierce sunlight bouncing off its hull as I tried to read its name. Pink Gin, a 175-foot carbon fibre sloop with murano glass chandeliers, is owned by Hans Georg Näder, a billionaire third-generation German prosthetics tycoon. “The captain has my number so the owner might come by,” Shearer says, smiling. “Perhaps he’ll book a villa for next summer.”

Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen and subscribe to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the FT, at ft.com/culture-call or on Apple Podcasts