Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

How Kiawah Island Became the South’s Most Exclusive Sandbar

How a buggy, half-built golf development became one of the priciest addresses in the South is a story of foreign money, a hurricane, a bankruptcy and a great many very well-protected trees.

My most vivid—or at least most fraught—memory of my time at Kiawah Island in the 1990s is the grocery store. During my childhood, my family would vacation at Kiawah each summer. At that time, the nearest grocery store—miles from the island—was Piggly Wiggly, affectionately known as the Big Pig. We would get off the plane in Charleston and drive directly to the grocery store, where my father would announce that we must purchase everything we would need for the whole following week, because he was not wasting the vacation driving 45 minutes back and forth to the Piggly Wiggly. 

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

This gave grocery shopping a bizarre, Supermarket Sweep-style urgency. We invariably forgot something very basic. This was fine. We mostly ate at the ice cream shop Scoopers, anyway. 

In addition to ice cream, I associate Kiawah with boogie boarding, collecting sand dollars on the beach, and being wrongly told to run in a serpentine pattern if chased by an alligator. There is an alligator in every lagoon. The summer was very fun. It was not very glamorous. 

Now, if people associate Kiawah with anything, it’s PGA Championships at the Ocean Course, influencer weddings at the Sanctuary Hotel and Johnny Hilbrant sketches, the viral bits in which his “PE Guy” lampoons private equity for an audience largely made up of the people he’s mocking. Ask around and you’ll hear about Uber drivers who picked up unassuming couples from dinner in town, got $5,000 cash tips, and only later learned their passengers were early Amazon executives. In 2015, former Comcast Corp. CFO Michael Angelakis paid $20 million for an oceanfront house, a record for the island at the time. Former President Biden even lists the island as one of his favorite vacation spots. The last fact can perhaps be credited to Scoopers, now sadly closed (RIP, little ice cream shop). The rest of the items represent drastic change over the past 30........

© Observer