Plan one: Deliver the new collection before London Fashion Week and escape for a week's break, before starting the fabrics and designs for spring/summer 2001.
Plan two: Take a break in a warm, glamorous place where people are fashion conscious and be inspired.
We leave Heathrow on a mild, sunny February afternoon and head south with Air Mauritius - supper is delicious, the staff are delightful and we sleep happily through the night until landing smoothly, despite warnings of turbulence.
The immigration officer smiles and says Happy Valentine's day, and we are off in our taxi in 24 degrees of sultry heat... Palm trees are bending double over wind-whipped fields of sugar cane. We have flown into a cyclone.
In French and English, the car radio predicts a cyclone warning class 2 with winds at 100kmph. The driver is cheerful and assures us it will be sunny tomorrow as we speed along the coast road - bougainvillea, oleander and laburnum, colourful painted buses and tractors and people in saris and brightly-printed shirts.
There are Hindu and Muslim temples and Dutch Reform churches next to low houses with thatched roofs. People dhobi their clothes on the rocks in the river, and the hills are green to their cloud-covered summits. The sea is choppy, its surface dotted with single-sailed dhows. A shrine to Krishna bobs on a raft at the water's edge. Driving is definitely Indian-style, hand on horn, weaving between bicycles, trucks and buses.
By contrast, our hotel , The Residence, is an island of calm, with a gentle welcome offering of vanilla tea. Charming staff assure us that the cyclone will be over by tomorrow.
We are shown around our rooms by our butler and I decline his offer to unpack for me, despite having a leather hold-all unusually neatly packed. My cream-and-white linen clothes merge into the hotel staff uniforms, the seat covers and the bed linens.
The room has a slowly-revolving ceiling fan and a large balcony overlooking the pool and the sea. A natural harbour has formed inside the coral reef that stretches across our horizon - we walk along the beach in warm winds, watching windsurfers moving like greyhounds against the crashing breakers on the reef.
Returning through tropical gardens, we see the children's pool full of white plastic chairs - like a modern sculpture. It is a safety measure, and there are ominous sounds - hammer and nails on wooden shutters, staff battening down windows. Palm trees are being removed from the hall and the ones outside are being lashed to balconies.
The rain comes down in a dense curtain through the warm wind. Clouds of steam rise from the ground.
We have cocktails in a colonnaded, open-sided bar and watch the chic French families. A creole nanny wearing a striped uniform and a white frilled pinafore is pushing three-year-old twin boys gently around. The boys wave to us almost regally. We retire eventually to the calm of the cool bedroom and BBC Sport... Oh dear.
Day 2
Despite a raging storm, we sleep through the night and wake to more raging storm. Magically, a delicious breakfast arrives.
A class 3 cyclone warning has been issued, and the hotel staff are now wearing bright yellow waterproofs and black gum boots. They would look well in a North Sea fisheries commercial.
All palms, lamps and furniture have been removed from corridors, and the warm rain and strong winds blow through the buildings. It becomes very wet underfoot. You feel it might be the moment to rope the guests to the banisters so they can reach the ground safely.
On the lower ground floor, we discover "the sanctuary" and succumb to the gym, a place I have not visited since leaving school - many women and girls are toning their perfect bodies, plus one man is sweating over weights. Low boredom threshold forces an early exit.
Other luxury options are massage, facial, manicure, sauna and, best of all, a children's dining room complete with nannies.
The storm seems to be abating, so I take a siesta to test it, only to wake up to a patch of pale blue sky and the same roaring wind.
Of course, The Residence is the most elegant, comfortable and charming hotel to be holed up in a storm, just minus the joys of swimming and sea. It is warm and moist, the island needs the rain, and it is very exciting.
Day 3
Wake to really big rain storm. Much Dynarod activity by staff between serious downpours.
Decide that cards, Scrabble and books will be the order of the day. The waiter removing my breakfast trolley tells me it will all be over by noon and that I have been lucky to see a cyclone. I agree and wait in anticipation. Make sketches of spring/summer 2001 Resort collection and read Augustine of Hippo biography. A very interesting character, a fourth-century North African philosopher sent to Milan as a spin doctor for the young Roman emperor.
More rain... discover The Last Emperor on TV. Then watch Gilda, a 1940s movie with Rita Hayworth dressed in white sequins.
1pm: still raining and blowing.
On the clothes front in Mauritius, what looks best seems to be long and lean and slightly see-through. Mobile phone and basket and child on hip worn as accessories. The hair tied back, the body tall and slim and brown. One girl is dressed as Carmen in dark red wrapping skirt with frilled hem and halter top also wrapping and tying at the back. Saris are worn as sarongs over strapless one- piece bathing suits or bikini tops.
In the evening, we dine with a friend in the hotel, wind roaring through the terrace dining room and the band playing Moon River.
Day 4
6am: bright and sunny and breezy, but by 8.30am the tropical rain comes down and the sun umbrellas come in. 10am: sun out, umbrellas up, and I make first entry into swimming pool. Lovely. Followed immediately by a swim in the sea, which is a perfect temperature and not heaving up and down. Beachcombers employed by our hotel are raking the sand to remove the debris of white coral or volcanic black rocks thrown up by the cyclone. It looks like a Japanese Garden.
We are invited to a nearby hotel by a green-eyed young German woman who is the deputy manager - she employs 420 staff and a blue-eyed French chef who serves us an Indochine lunch of total deliciousness. The doorman and entrance staff at Beau Rivage wear nautical blue square-necked cotton sweaters with a mermaid embroidered on the pocket.
6pm: Indochine in French is the film on TV. Catherine Deneuve, cast and Vietnam all looking beautiful.
Frogs croaking in noisy chorus on and off in the waterlilies as you go to sleep.
Day 5
Wake to birds singing lustily, bright sun, stiff breeze. Warm swim in pool and in sea, both perfect. Wooden slatted sunbeds and towels, extra large, all freely available. Gentle sellers offer baskets and sarongs on the beach. Walk in the gardens, all very fragrant, planted with hibiscus, old frangipani trees, tall firs, palms and roses. Visit hotel gallery shop, all cream and cocoa and navy and khaki grown-up resort clothes - the gift shop offers bright handpainted trays and papier-mché dodos and locally-made presents.
Lunch in The Plantation, very French tropical bar-restaurant with a wooden terrace overlooking the Indian Ocean. The whole hotel is designed to seem like a planter's house with open verandas on two floors. All woodwork is plain and simple and painted a soft blue. The roof has pigeon grey tiles, and the building is painted cream.
The central hall is pillared and galleried with plain brown wood posts and open to the sky. The stone floor has a mosaic circle in the centre and good modern rattan and cream linen-covered furniture. There is a pair of old wooden doors (Burmese?) and carved teak benches, slightly Buddhist temple in feel.
Day 6
Early morning. Solo rider on the beach on a heavy grey horse which swam in the sea up to its neck, later joined by three good-looking bay horses and they all cantered off round the volcanic rocks and out of sight.
Sadly, our days here are over, and we leave the island under a huge full moon, and gentle murmurs of perhaps another blowy week to come.
The practicals
Elegant Resorts has seven nights at The Residence from £1895pp in an ocean front double room inc half board, return flights from Heathrow with Air Mauritius and private car transfers. Details from 0870 3333380. Best to go April-June and Sept-Nov; hottest is Jan-April, but hurricanes may strike.
