Far, Far Away From Home; Buying a villa in Tuscany is so cliche. These days, luxury consumers want their holiday refuges to be off the beaten path.(Cover story)

Byline: Michelle Jana Chan

Buzz Dow, 58, who runs a family business in Cincinnati, Ohio, already had a second home in Vail, Colorado, and was looking for a third by the sea. So he started researching properties in the popular vacation-home markets of Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama. "But we wanted to be in a community that was less developed and didn't have a lot of tourism," he says. "When I started looking at Nicaragua, my wife thought I was totally crazy." Eventually she came around; the couple ended up buying two adjoining two-bedroom properties in the whitewashed-village-style Pelican Eyes Piedras y Olas development, with its infinity pools and stunning views of the bay of San Juan del Sur.

Like luxury shoppers, holiday-home buyers are increasingly looking beyond the usual destinations. Rather than battle the crowds in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, they prefer quieter, more-remote locales like Nicaragua, Morocco, the gulf and Uruguay. Partly they're being driven by the burgeoning second-home market; in the U.K. alone, the Knight Frank residential-research firm predicts second-home ownership will quadruple within the next 10 to 15 years. "There's a desire for somewhere different now," says Nick Barnes, a partner at Knight Frank. "The luxury market, for reasons of exclusivity, is willing to travel to more-exotic locations, irrespective of infrequent flights and a longer flight time."

But they also want to be coddled when they get there. The Dubai-based Jumeirah Group--whose portfolio includes the Burj Al Arab hotel, New York's Essex House and the Carlton Tower in London--has launched a new division called Jumeirah Living, which plans to offer properties in 22 developments from Bermuda to Shanghai in the next four years. According to general manager Julie Shields, it is targeting the seriously affluent who already may have several homes. "They're high ...