We fly from Nairobi in a plane that is one up from that used by Le Petit Prince, land at the one-strip airport with a thatched shed waiting-room, then take a speedboat past timeless fishing villages and mangrove swamps. Welcome to Lamu, a remote island off the coast of Kenya. The downside is the journey. But the upside is that there’s no jet-lag: it’s only three hours ahead of GMT. It’s also where the hip crowd goes. Think Tracey Emin, Sting and make-up artist to the stars, Mary Greenwell.

The lure of Lamu becomes immediately apparent if you stay in Jahazi, a Swahili-style house on a deserted beach about 25 minutes by boat from mainland Kenya at the southernmost tip of the island. You’re welcomed at the water’s edge by five staff – includingyour own boat captain and private chef – all wearing white shorts and Africa-sized smiles. With its private pool, fabulous baraza (meeting area), five colonial Swahili-style bedrooms and view of the Indian Ocean, many guests feel inclined simply to remain supine. (‘I hope for a massive storm so that we have to stay longer,’ scribbled Ewan McGregor in the visitors’ book.)

Jahazi is one of only six Kizingoni Beach Houses built next to what must be the longest stretch of deserted beach in the universe and surrounded by sand dunes. A few steps away from the ocean, the houses are built of coral block and plastered in the local limestone, with palm-thatched roofs, terraces overlooking the ocean, limestone floors tinted a soft ochre yellow and al fresco bathrooms beneath starry African skies (think also Swahili carved wooden door frames, colonial Swahili furniture and palm-leaf Ali Baba lampshades).

All you have to do here is move from one bed to another: from opium beds with big bolsters and oversized raw silk cushions to ones built onniru (plasterwork) bases, hammocks swinging in the breeze, romantic mozzie-net-draped four-posters, traditional Lamu day beds and kikoi-strewn beds swinging from coconut fibre ropes and overlooking the gardens. You wake up to alarm calls from tropical birds and to waves crashing on the white sand.

It’s compelling to spend days just flicking through magazines and eating the day’s catch and coconut rice, served on the terrace overlooking the ocean by the barefoot butler with the mega-watt smile. But Leslie Duckworth, known locally as the Duchess of Fixit, has other ideas for us. Probably the person who put Lamu so fashionably on the map, the Duchess is one of that peculiarly Kenyan breed of indefatigable entrepreneur. She knows le tout Afrique, manages the Kizingoni Beach Houses and has decorated them stylishly, writes books on African medicinal plants, buys and sells houses, is involved in the Lamu women’s community projects, has a shop in Nairobi…

She insists we stir ourselves and walk the few steps to the beach as night falls and the sky fills with stars. There we find a table set, Savoy-style, with a linen cloth and crockery, and at which we sit alone on a beach under the endless African sky eating succulent barbecued prawns and skewered crayfish followed by delicate passion fruit sorbet served by our butler. (Nets laden with fish from snapper to tuna are delivered daily to the beach.) Then Samburu warriors appear suddenly wearing vivid fabrics and bead and feather headdresses, and do frenetic and primitive tribal dances. There’s no sense that they’ve done this a million times before for tourists, because they haven’t.

The more energetic visitors can water-ski (a speedboat and boatman come with the house), donut, snorkel and swim the channel between the house and the mainland. (‘Amazing,’ concluded Sienna Miller in the guest book. ‘Swam with dolphins TWICE.’) Or you can get up at 6am and – accompanied by Samburu to deter the occasional petty thief; there is virtually no violent crime on the island – walk for around three hours in the cool of the early morning. (The less fit can go by donkey or camel.) As the sun moves up the sky, you stride through the sand eight miles to Shela, the Notting Hill of Lamu, along a beach where sea turtles lay eggs at full moon and thousands of teeny pink crabs scuttle sideways into the water. We pass only a goat, a stray dog and wandering cattle and, closer to civilisation, some donkeys with straw panniers being filled with stones and a Moses-style figure wading through the water, hauling a boat made from a hollowed tree trunk and carrying a live goat and a cow.

Finally we arrive in Shela. This is where you can sit on cushions in the famous Sixties Peponi Hotel to have a feast of fish in coconut off big brass trays; eat on the terrace while gazing at the dhows sailing past; or lounge at the bar – the centre of the world out here and the only place in Shella serving alcohol – where rastas and Euros in leopard-print bikinis share Tusker beers with royalty. I sit on the terrace feeling mightily smug at having covered my eight miles so fast. I drink steaming cups of coffee, eat fresh exotic fruits and gaze longingly across the water at the Robinson Crusoe home of the tribal-inspired jewellery designer, Carolyn Roumeguere (Julian Sands, Nicole Kidman and Donna Karan are fans).

And then it’s off to look at Shela. It’s clean, gentrified and quaint. A place less spoilt and cheaper than the Caribbean. A place where women wear sequinned kaftans and cheery sarongs. There’s only one bar and one restaurant; it’ll never be St Tropez, thankfully. But it is the place to buy former dilapidated Swahili houses, most now fashionably renovated. Go and see a few with Englishman Andrew McGhie who started Lamu Island Property – the island’s first real estate agency – and climb their stairs and look over makuti thatched roofs at the biblical scene. A delightful and engaging man, Andrew will spirit you into Arab houses built of coral and limestone and Swahili houses with mangrove and coconut roofs. ‘The island has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 100,’ he says.

If you just want to rent a house for your holiday, try El Yafir, just moments away from Peponi. It’s the stylish house of Mary Greenwell,- who counts Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightly and Kate Moss among her clients. Mary bought a plot five years ago in Shela. Inspired by the island’s Islamic traditions, she designed her beautiful petit palais with the help of architect Claudio Modola. It has niru floors, Swahili doors and furniture designed by Mary and fashioned by traditional craftsmen in local woodwork shops where artisans make intricate mahogany carved door-frames and bed-heads.

A vast Rajasthani front door leads into a cool hall with a fountain and font with bougainvillea petals floating in it. If there is such a thing as romantic church style, then this is it, with its arches, pillars, hanging glass lanterns and ecclesiastical-style windows. There are an abundance of places in which to lie and daydream: delightful alcoves containing day beds, four posters swathed in muslin, Moorish-style sunken baths and a fairy-tale terrace with urns of bougainvillea, cascading flowers and fringed with cream curtains fluttering in the breeze. There seem also to be endless smiling staff bringing endless plates of endless deliciousness, and they all come with the house when you rent it.

If you’re lucky (and Lamu is that kind of place) Andrew or Mary may introduce you to Eric and Christina Zeller – who live about ten donkey paces away from El Yafir. If so, go and be nosey in their home, Lulu Y Shella (Pearl of Shella), the spacious Fifties house built by casting director Bonni Allen. Now lived in by Eric, an interior and furniture designer and architect, and Christina, the über-stylish accessories designer for Givenchy, their house with its fusion of European and African idioms bears many of his deft touches combined with her aesthetic stamp. Between them they’ve come up with an eclectic mixture of cool features: from Arabic words as murals on the white plaster walls (‘we hoped it was going to be a lovely poem,’ laughs Christina, ‘but it turns out it’s just the opening times of the local museum’), to a stunning Eric-designed driftwood table that stretches almost to the mainland.

If you fancy travelling further back in time, jump in a boat and bounce over the waves a few minutes to Lamu town, a place so remote it has been spared modernisation and civilisation as we know it. Lamu is Kenya’s oldest town, a bustling port and Unesco World Heritage site with 72,000 inhabitants, 25,000 donkeys and one donkey sanctuary (opened by two Englishwomen, natch.) It has just one car (which belongs to the District Commissioner), one road (too narrow to turn; if the DC forgets something he has to reverse home), and 28 mosques for its mostly Muslim population.

Here you find women in traditional black bui buis and men in white kanzu robes wandering along tiny, winding alleyways, some only three feet wide. And there’s a throbbing market whose vendors, seated on the ground, sell sweet potatoes and papayas outside the 19th-century fort – once a prison and now housing a cyber cafe.

Originally a 14th-century Swahili sea trader settlement trading ivory, leopard skins, rhino horn and, later, slaves, it has an alluring mixture of Arab, Portuguese, Turkish, Omani and British influences from its erstwhile settlers: the Turks with their glassware and the Omanis with their art and arches. From the 9th century dhows have arrived in Lamu on the Kaskazi wind from the east with perfume, sugar and silk. Lamu is redolent of that history and going into the charming port-side museum is little different from standing in the street.

There’s fine Swahili architecture (including 16th-century houses) and many 19th-century mansions – high, austere, windowless homes hiding airy courtyards pungent with jasmine and delightful, hidden cool spaces with carved doors, intricate coral work, plasterwork niches and, possibly even antique hardwood furniture inlaid with bone. You can see all this and more with Andrew McGhie, if you’re looking to buy. (It’ll cost a snip of what anything as beautiful would cost nearer home; contact him on +254 (0)720 859 599, www.lamuislandproperty.com).

Lamu is known for attracting the ‘gyp set’: artists, eccentrics, escapists, dreamers, weirdos and romantics (once it was the African version of Kathmandu, a paradise for backpackers in search of alternative realities). It’s far from Kenya’s mainland political instability and election violence. There are no perilous roads, no traffic jams, no television and, thankfully, a lousy internet signal. Just dhow racing, henna painting competitions, donkey racing and er, competitions for who has the most healthy donkey (the prize for a robust donkey? A mobile phone).

It’s a place where time is measured in sunsets and you feel free and supremely relaxed; where you’re in touch with the vast African sky, nature and the rhythms of life. Where there are dhows in full sail and donkeys laden with panniers of coral rock. Where there are exotic days filled with lime sodas, sea breezes and ever-smiling people.

As long as you remember to keep slapping on the factor Ten Zillion suncream (it’s two degrees south of the Equator) and popping the horrid anti-malarial pills, if you must (although, being an island, there are virtually no cases of the disease,) there’s no downside. We bounce back along the waves to our Kizingoni Beach House, a smile on my face, another in my heart. Yes, it certainly out-paradises the competition.

Kizingoni Beach Houses from £1,965 per person based on four couples sharing a house for seven nights on a fully inclusive basis, including flights and transfers and airport taxes. For more information or to book, call Scott Dunn on 020 8682 5070;www.scottdunn.com. E-mail africa@scottdunn.com or info@kizingoni.com.
Virgin Atlantic flies Heathrow to Nairobi daily. Fares from £379. Book on: 08448 747 747; www.virginatlantic.com.

To hire Mary Greenwell’s house, contact Babu British: 00 254 7358 02340; babubritish@yahoo.com. High season prices: December, January, August – $400 for the master bedroom, and $50 for each extra person using the other two bedrooms per night. February and March: $300 for the master bedroom, and $50 for each extra person. Rest of year: $250 for master bedroom and $50 for each extra person. Price includes transfers, private chef and house boys. Food and beverages extra. Menus can be discussed on a daily basis with the chef.