BY THE TIME Jamaica gained independence from Britain in 1962, a number of the sugar plantation owners there had moved on, but the island remained a refuge for a certain type of English expat: literary, artistic, wealthy. The “James Bond” author Ian Fleming and the composer and playwright Noël Coward, among others, built elegant beachside or mountaintop estates at a far remove from the nation’s rising tide of Pan-African Rastafarianism.

Ben Sklar

At Bohemia, a group of wild cats roam throughout the house. They’ll happily accept food but, when someone tries to pet them, they scatter.

At the urging of her son, Sally built Bohemia after her husband, the director Perry Henzell, died in 2006. “It was such a wonderful, cathartic idea,” she says, “for me to, with my grief, start again.”

A pair of chairs that Henzell designed overlook the ocean from an upstairs window. Bohemia has few closed walls so that she can enjoy the breezes that drift in from the water.

Though Perry and Sally Henzell were born on the island to parents with British roots, they chose a different path. Perry, who died in 2006 at 70, was the son of a plantation manager. He left as a teenager to study in England and later worked for the BBC in London before returning home to help set up the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. About a decade later, he directed and produced the seminal 1972 feature “The Harder They Come,” starring the musician and actor Jimmy Cliff, which helped bring reggae and Jamaican culture to a global audience. When he married Sally Densham, a 22-year-old farmer’s daughter from Mandeville in the country’s interior in 1965, she had recently returned to Jamaica from a job dressing windows at Selfridges in London. She wound up art directing and costuming “The Harder They Come,” as well as developing an interior design practice and eventually creating Jakes Hotel, the family’s ever-evolving, unassumingly stylish 32-year-old resort in Treasure Beach, on the island’s southern coast. That enclave, mostly designed by Sally, is both geographically and spiritually far from the all-inclusive clamor of Negril and Montego Bay — a mélange of Jamaican, Moroccan and Indian influences, touched by the spirit of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí.

Framed family photos hang above Henzell’s desk in a corner of her open-plan bedroom at Bohemia. Scattered with daybeds, the space is inspired by her vision of an opium den.Credit…Ben Sklar

DESPITE THE COUPLE’S deep imprint on the local culture and its music industry, their greatest legacy may be the family homes Sally created over the decades. She first stumbled on the 1,800-square-foot Itopia (the name is her play on the word “utopia”), a cut-limestone manor built in the 1660s in the hills above Runaway Bay on the northern coast, 60 miles from Kingston, the capital, soon after “The Harder They Come” was released. At the time, Perry, Sally and their two children, Jason and Justine, were living in Kingston, in a complex that included their home, Perry’s production studio and Sally’s workshop. But when she saw the elegantly ramshackle three-bedroom house with a free-standing, one-bedroom annex on three and a quarter acres, she says, she “knew at that moment it was mine.”