At the Abaco Club, members (who pay $65,000 to join, plus another $4,000 in annual dues) can buy one of 75 fully furnished $1.7 to $2.3 million turnkey cottages,­ but they also have the option of building their own homes on 60 sites available for $1.5 to $4 million. The one- to two-acre sites have drop-dead-gorgeous views of the brilliant blue sea and white-powder sand beach, not to mention the club's clifftop, oceanfront golf course, which numerous pro players have hailed as the first true Scottish-style tropical-links course in the Caribbean. Like famed St. Andrews in Scotland, the dramatically undulating, windblown oceanfront has been landscaped meticulously to maximize its natural changes­ and challenges.

Most of the multimillion-dollar sites are currently, however, vacant lots. Located not in developed Nassau, but on one of the Bahamas' more remote and rough-edged Family Islands, the spectacular $250 million resort was, only a couple of years ago, 500 acres of scrubby, overgrown jungle - including, PdS snarls, "50,000 bloody casuarinas." Every one of the dangerously invasive shallow-rooted pine trees (which blow over in hurricane winds and spread and take over the area) was cleared to allow re-establishment of native plants. PdS is known as a sound environmentalist.

But the 61-year-old dynamo is an even sounder businessman. Hence his impulse nursery buy. "I was coming from the airport," de Savary explains, "thinking, 'Gosh, home owners are going to need a huge number of trees and shrubs to landscape nicely. Where are they going to get them?' And as I was thinking it, we were driving past a nursery. So I went in, had a chat with the owner, and took over the place."

"That's PdS in a nutshell," his friend and public relations consultant Sandy Gardiner chuckles, defining the de Savary difference. "?'They'll need plants. I'll buy the nearest nursery. Done!'