Top O' Tobago - Review Page 1
Reviewed by Steve & Jill Wooler in February 2004 and March 2008
We first stayed at Top O’ Tobago in February 2004. Our review introduction, written following that visit, stated…
“…there are always some properties that take you by surprise; that exceed all expectation and that find a particular corner of fondness in your recollections. Top O’ Tobago was one such property.”
It is four years since we expressed that sentiment. In the intervening years, Top O’ Tobago has benefited from remodelling and general refurbishment. However, against that, we have stayed at more than thirty other properties on the island. How would we feel on a revisit?
Top O’ Tobago is a fascinating property. It rather defies classification. Is it a villa, a guest-house or apartment accommodation? The property consists of a two-bedroom ‘main house’ and three one-bedroom studio cabañas. The complex was designed as a retreat for groups or families of up to 17 people. It is normally rented as a complete entity, but the individual units are also often rented separately. This is where it becomes difficult to categorise the property. However, whatever the classification, we felt it was time to update our review and see how it stacked up against the other 300 self-catering holiday apartments, cottages, houses and villas on Tobago…
Location
Top O’ Tobago is located on a hilltop at Arnos Vale, on Tobago’s Caribbean coast. The buildings sit amidst six acres of luxurious tropical gardens. The beautiful Arnos Vale beach is a pleasant 10-minute stroll away. The stunning views encompass sea and mountain vistas.
Very few visitors will leave Tobago without having visited, or at least heard of, Arnos Vale. This former sugar cane and cocoa plantation lies just outside Plymouth, Tobago’s second largest town (think small British village).
Virtually all signs of the plantation are now gone. A small hotel was built there to take advantage of arguably the best location on the island. I last stayed there in 1988. Even then the hotel was losing ground against newer hotels. The Arnos Vale Hotel never recovered. It is now a sad travesty of the hotel it was, or could be.
What cannot be denied is that Arnos Vale still boasts one of the finest habitats on Tobago for bird life. As if this is not enough, the bay provides some of the best snorkelling on the island.
An unusual combination of geographical features combines to create this unique environment. The Arnos Vale estate lies in the fertile valleys between a series of undulating hump-backed hills that run north-east from Plymouth towards Culloden. The terrain is quite unique for Tobago in that these hills are largely bare, primarily covered with tough bush-grass and only sparsely by small trees and shrubbery. The appearance is almost totally at odds with the lush green hills that face them and which form the central hilly spine of the island.
Top O’ Tobago is located on a hilltop amidst six acres of beautiful grounds, planted with mature tropical trees and shrubs too numerous to list here. The property takes wonderful advantage of the terrain and magnificent views.
Arnos Vale is a 30-minute drive from the airport. It lies outside the most densley populated Crown Point-Plymouth-Scarborough triangle and is therefore a little further from the main shopping and restaurant areas. Against that, you are located in the heart of one of the most beautiful areas of Tobago and truly at one with nature. This is what Tobago is really about!
Guests staying at Top O’ Tobago normally receive a full meet and greet service at the airport from the property’s friendly Canadian manager, Hugh Baker. He will provide complimentary transfer to and from the airport, but a self-drive rental vehicle is essential if you are to get the best out of this property. Local shopping facilities are limited and there are no real facilities within walking distance. Taxis are available, but given the distance to the main shopping/restaurant areas, this is likely to prove a more expensive and less convenient option than a self-drive rental.
The views from Top O' Tobago are impossible to describe and even difficult to illustrate. Readers with a fast Internet connection and a large high-resolution screen (minimum 1280x1024dpi) can get a taste of the vistas by clicking on the thumbnail panoramic image below. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the panorama window to move through the entire image.
Architecture
I can best summarise the architectural style of Top O’ Tobago as ‘interesting’. That’s the way I described it in our 2004 review. Given the changes and improvements that have taken place at the property, I think I would now like to upgrade that description to ‘fascinating’ and even ‘unique’.
The property essentially consists of four low, single storey buildings sympathetically constructed and following the contours of the hill on which they are located. The main house and swimming pool perch on the top of the hill. The 
three cabañas descend down one hillside, each a little lower than the one before. The manager’s apartment and parking area occupy the opposite face. Between the two, the hilltop is dominated by the most colourful and aesthetically pleasing tiered gardens, retaining walls, sweeping walkways and balustrades that I have seen on the island.
As you walk around the property you constantly find new features: patios, lookouts and bird watching points; little private gazebos or private sun decks. The layout seems awfully complex, but surprisingly, it actually only covers a relatively small area of land.
I guess the style of the buildings could best be described as Caribbean with Latin-American overtones. Each building has a large, shallow-pitched light green corrugated roof with deep overhangs providing shade and, in the case of the main house, a wide terrace. The buildings are finished in white-painted render, with wooden doors, window shutters and other timberwork finished in dark green. The windows and semi-circular door tops have attractive white wrought-iron grills for security and to minimise ingress by birds, whilst not inhibiting cooling sea breeze through-drafts.
The overall look of the property is attractive. Both the buildings and grounds were in excellent decorative and maintenance order at the time of 
our visit. The main house was originally intended as a retirement home for the owners, who still spends extensive period at the villa. It has the look and feel of being a ‘real’ house – nothing at all like the pristine, antiseptic, modern villas that are springing up all over Tobago.
The buildings sympathetically blend with the surroundings. The lush well-maintained gardens come right up to, and almost inside, the main house and cabanas. You feel, and are, surrounded by nature. The clever layout also means that from no point can you see the entire complex. The buildings are in close proximity, but each is on a different level to its neighbour. This makes the layout visually interesting, with attractive details like the two separate paths that lead from the cabañas to the main house and which split into different directions beneath and around the swimming pool, each offering views of totally different aspects of the property.
I can only say that we found the entire place delightful. We felt immediately ‘at home’. However, this is not a property for the infirm or those with walking disabilities. Although the flights of steps from the lowest cabaña to the main house are gentle, they demand full mobility.
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