When Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin chose Somerset Chapel on Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina, as their wedding venue in 2019, the singer and model showed seriously good taste.
The couple famously invited 200 guests to the 20,000-acre nature reserve of jaw-dropping scenery on the May River at Bluffton.
The chapel is owned by luxury hotel Montage Palmetto Bluff, which sits at the heart of the reserve and is reached after a stunning 10-mile drive along a shady avenue of oaks draped in Spanish moss.
Wedding guests (among them a Kardashian or two) would have passed by fields of lush green marsh, loud with bullfrogs and cicadas, where alligators, and brown pelican live side by side with turtles and crabs.
It’s a romantic paradise, with all the slow Southern charm offered by the Lowcountry, with an intoxicating mix of high-end luxury and the natural world. If you want more credentials – it was once home to the Vanderbilts and the area became a playground for prominent New Yorkers like JP Morgan and the Rockefellers decamping from the city for the summer.
On our visit, two wedding parties came out of Somerset Chapel – set along the interior waterway of the hotel – early evening to avoid the burning humidity of August in South Carolina. And like the Biebers, the receptions were held in one of the three ballrooms.
Is it a secret location, so starry that mere mortals don’t check in? It’s a hot spot for wealthy couples and families that’s for sure, who arrive from driveable locations such as Atlanta and Savannah and metropolitan hubs such as NYC, Chicago and Washington DC to spend three or four days here.
But for British guests Palmetto Bluff is a hidden gem, so it’s a must if you’re exploring Savannah, Charleston and Beaufort and the gorgeous low-lying coastline and beaches of South Carolina.
Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin chose Somerset Chapel (above), part of the Montage Palmetto Bluff resort in South Carolina, as their wedding venue in 2019. Sarah Hartley checked in to the hotel to discover why it lures the rich and famous
LEFT: Bieber and Baldwin during their Somerset Chapel wedding. RIGHT: Sarah takes a peek inside
Montage is ripe as a sweet peach when we check in and are at once offered an Arnold Palmer, named after the famous golfer, as a welcome drink. That’s sweet iced-tea with lemonade – and for some of us – with a shot of bourbon.
Inside, the 200-room hotel has the inimitable style of a grand plantation home, spacious and gracious, with an elegant central floral arrangement and white walls adorned with landscape paintings and polished wood floors.
In the Heritage Hall is a revolving display of art by Gullah Geechee artist Amiri Farris. The Gullah Geechee people are slave descendants brought to work on the coastal rice, cotton and indigo plantations.
Farris is something of a rock star for the local community with a fresh indigo and white palette or vibrant abstracts. His art is on display in the library where leather wing-back chairs flank the welcoming fire year-round.
We’re in time for ‘porching’, an afternoon tradition of taking iced tea and freshly baked cookies on the porch, the breeze and overhead fans keeping us cool.
Afterwards we swap our car for bikes – far easier to pedal in the heat than walk.
We meander along brick paths lined with oaks, some with swings hanging from them and pass white, single-storey cottages scattered about with lanterns at the door. A family pass us on bikes, carefree, and handsome, the mum in a headscarf, the boys blond and tanned in linen shirts and shorts, giving off a Kennedy vibe.
We stop at the last one, Cottage 60, in what is surely the prettiest spot on the May River, sitting high on the bluff and with a lagoon behind it.
Montage Palmetto Bluff is set in ‘a romantic paradise, with all the slow Southern charm offered by the Lowcountry’, writes Sarah
One of the pools at Montage, which also offers tennis courts, basketball, croquet and an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus signature golf course
Leather wing-back chairs and a roaring fire keep things cosy for guests at Montage Palmetto Bluff
It’s a one-bedroom cottage with formal living room for entertaining, a roaring fire and a screened-in porch with steamer chairs and sofa for watching the sun set and the fireflies buzz.
If you’re the kind of person who finds it hard to switch off, I defy you to not feel the weight of relaxation wash over you as you limply turn the page of a book in the heat and the breeze, a glass in hand listening to the sounds of the South.
Look up and you’ll see the porch painted ‘Haint Blue’, a pale sky colour, a traditional shade used in the South to keep ‘Haints’ or ‘haunts/ghosts’ out of homes. Go to paint supplier Sherwin Williams and you’ll be able to pick up Haint Blue if you’re taken with it.
Porches are required to be eight feet deep in properties here – as it’s a place to entertain the whole family in unbearable heat and where the breeze lifts from the May River later in the day.
Sightings of ‘gators, heron and brown pelican become so common that you won’t even reach for your phone after a while. It’s easy to forget we’re trespassing on their territory – not the other way round.
You can’t help but be curious about the glorious history of the place. Of course, you can delve deeply back here to the indigenous tribes, then the French and Spanish who came ashore. Bluffton was razed by Union forces in the Civil War and the Heyward House in the Old Town is open for visitors as one of the few surviving properties from the day Bluffton burnt. You’ll get the shivers when you read ‘Flee rebels, Hell is here’, scratched on a drawing room mirror by a union soldier.
You’ll feel the presence of a more recent past too, when you hear about the flamboyant character of RT Wilson Snr, who went from a dirt-poor farmer’s boy in Georgia to one of Wall St’s most successful financiers.
By 1900 he was worth $2billion and he bought around 18,000 acres along the May River at Bluffton as a hunting paradise and called it Palmetto Bluff.
Trees draped in Spanish moss are a feature of Montage Palmetto Bluff, notes Sarah
A boat pootles along one of the waterways that meanders around the bluff
Montage has been voted (by Forbes) as one of the five places in the US to save your marriage, reveals Sarah
His son, also Richard, was to inherit the site and with his wife Marion built a spectacular property to entertain friends from New York.
The 72-room, four-storey Wilson mansion had a grand ballroom with a gold ceiling from France. Lavish parties were legendary and the Montage archaeologist says empty bottles found down wells (it was Prohibition after all) show they served the finest Champagne – and plenty of it.
But 14 years later, the Wilson mansion burnt to the ground after a fire in the attic. Richard had to be led out of the house twice, sobbing at his dream going up in flames. Marion, however, was more practical and threw pair after pair of shoes onto the burning lawn (what a gal).
Lives of the rich and decadent cannot compare with the wealth of natural beauty on the May River.
From the Montage boat yard we take a dolphin cruise with Captain Boo, late one afternoon, and speed along into stretches described as ‘like fingers out to the Atlantic’. Captain Boo cuts the engine on sightings of a pod and to hear the endearing snorts of the gleaming mammals as they break the surface of the water and dive again is heart-bursting.
Then we see something the captain calls ‘super rare’ – strand feeding. The birds along the river were squawking crazily to one another as two dolphins circled closer and closer to shore, nudging dark shoals of fish. Then the pair suddenly beached themselves to feast on the fish they’d stranded. And in a flash they flipped back in the water, satiated.
Even off the water, there’s fun to be had, although the kid’s camp is nothing brash – Montage is way too sophisticated. Plus Southern parents like to spend time with their offspring.
There’s the awesome five-storey Mount Pelia treehouse to climb, built around a majestic oak. There’s a family pool as well as an adult pool, tennis courts (for lessons), basketball, croquet and a big draw – the 18-hole Jack Nicklaus signature golf course designed around historic trees and said to be one of the most beautiful in the US.
Montage Palmetto Bluff takes the American tradition of S’Mores – toasting marshmallows and chocolate – very seriously
‘Porching’ is the afternoon tradition of taking iced tea and freshly baked cookies on the porch. Above is one of the spots for this offered by the hotel
Bikes are available for guests to roam the grounds on
You can happily send youngsters off to buy ice-cream at Melts, the parlour on the Village Green, where they may spot the canine Montage ambassadors – Cayley, Bodie and Finch out for a walk.
For even in this languid heat, expect to dine well and feel your waistband tighten. Our favourite spot was Octagon restaurant, where the Lowcountry menu tempts at breakfast with soft buttery pancake stacks soused with berries and whipped cream through to heritage tomatoes and soft-shell crab at lunch and dinner with steak and lemon puff pie.
And there’s always room for S’Mores (an American tradition of toasting marshmallows and chocolate with Hershey’s chocolate between Graham crackers). As the stars come out, and the bullfrogs call, families huddle round the spitting fire pits outside.
Mornings are slow at Montage, but as the mist lifts from the lagoon, couples make their way in white cotton bathrobes to the cute-as-a-button spa, with its separate sauna and steam rooms. It’s pristine white with green plants to warm the vibe and there’s a private outdoor pool to use for the day if you’re booked in for a treatment.
I’m introduced to massage therapist Miss Mandy, who little wonder works magic on tense shoulders after 20 years in the job.
Little wonder, too, that Montage has been voted (by Forbes) as one of the five places in the US to save your marriage – and is unsurprisingly chosen by the rich and famous as the ultimate destination for an unforgettable wedding.
Montage Palmetto Bluff: from $515 (£400) per night for standard rooms and from $995 (£771) for cottages. Visit www.montage.com.
