Self-made multimillionaire Peter de Savary keeps his eye on the details - even when that means crawling on his resort's dining-room carpet to retrieve crumbs gone astray.
British businessman Peter de Savary is a perfect illustration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's maxim "The rich are different from you and me." While it's not unusual for travelers visiting the Bahamas to stop impulsively on the way to their hotel to pick up roadside souvenirs, for instance, last year de Savary stopped on the way to his Abaco Club to pick up a nursery.

He made his first few millions in the oil and shipyard industries, but de Savary is best known these days for the exclusive resort clubs he's developed over the past couple of decades. Among the first was the Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle, named for steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the Scottish manor's former owners and a personal role model of de Savary. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," Carnegie once said, and de ­Savary's lavish restoration of the castle, which he bought in 1990 and developed into a private sporting retreat for the well known and well heeled, certainly reflects this adage. One of the enormous bathrooms houses a billiard table.

Since then, PdS - his preferred moniker - has opened four other elegantly elite sporting estates and hotels, all but one members-only: Carnegie Abbey in Newport, Rhode Island, America's premier Gilded Age playground; Cherokee Plantation, a 4,000-acre colonial­-era estate outside Charleston, South Carolina; the public Bovey Castle (actually a massive manor house, but a very royal-feeling retreat indeed), in Devon, England; and most recently, the tropically paradisiacal Abaco Club at Winding Bay in the Bahamas.