The Tuscan dream of Castelalfi, the village-resort that is a world in miniature

Italian high hospitality is in the process of specialisation. Hotels are seeking increasingly defined market niches. An upward competition that is difficult to sustain, if not by differentiating themselves. There are the five-star and five-star luxury hotels. Then there are the hotels in cities of art, those in holiday resorts (by the sea, in the mountains or in the countryside), those for families and those for sports enthusiasts, those for those who love extreme privacy or, on the contrary, conviviality. Then there are the hamlets-hotels, with large estates around them, vegetable gardens, orchards, vineyards, livestock farms, real farms, almost always organic. To this category belongs Castelfalfi, a resort with spa that after years of searching for its own identity has finally found it with its new Indian owner.

La Spa

Sri Prakash Lohia, entrepreneur and founder of Indorama Corporation, an Asian petrochemical and textile giant with a turnover of almost $19 billion, fell in love in an instant with this village of Etruscan origin in Val d'Era, between Florence, Pisa and Siena. All you have to do is pick a hillock and turn around to realise its size: everything you see on the horizon is part of it. Meadows, hills, vineyards, orchards, lakes, woods for over a thousand hectares of horizon. But also the medieval centre, the church, the park with its fountains, the fortress, the white roads, the tree-lined avenues, the zip line and the golf course, 27 holes among the most challenging in Italy. Everything.

Olivina Lounge

Moral, in 2021, Mr. Lohia bought the estate, a special place for the family to gather, to be as comfortable as any other guest. He called in the architectural firms Affine Design, Caberlon Caroppi and Henry Chebaane and entrusted them with the million-dollar renovation project, complete with domotics, design, leisure and nature, without which it makes no sense today to think of a break from everyday life. The spaces have been modernised, the standards raised, without upsetting the atmosphere of the medieval centre with its shops, bar, pizzeria and ice-cream parlour overlooking the avenue that runs through it from top to bottom. And today, that little ancient bucolic world has become a modern resort with 146 rooms and 7 villas and farmhouses embraced by an iconic countryside, the perfect postcard of Tuscany.

Grand Suite

The experience does not end in the commonplace - lobbies, restaurants, bars - with the rarity of a collection of antique books and a spa - Rakxa - that finally tells something unusual with its Thai approach. Here you are forced to take a walk if you want to eat the Florentine steak at the trattoria Il Rosmarino or the gourmet menu at the Rocca (opens on 1 June). You have to go out, you even have to take the car to the wine cellar to taste the house oil, wine, beer and grappa, even though you are always in the confines of 'your' resort. And at the high points of the year - summer, Christmas, the beginning of spring - there are festivals in the village with stalls, fritters and porchetta, musicians and acrobats, bringing a cheerful flow of humanity even from neighbouring towns, if only for the curiosity of entering for a few hours into that fairy-tale realm of the holidays.

The project, however, is more ambitious. The rooms are many, the year is long and there is no shortage of space at Castelfalfi. And precisely because of the specialisation now necessary to stand out, it is necessary to think big and long term. The new conference centre should be finished in October, with the idea of bringing events to the village and becoming one of the first facilities in Italy in terms of size and capacity, exploiting its off-season potential to the full. The challenge has begun, meeting in Castelfalfi is (and will be) for great occasions.