Go behind the scenes at these epic hotel productions, which have a Walk of Fame’s worth of well-known faces behind them, whether they’re owned by actors, directors or producers. We can’t promise the star-proprietors will help with your luggage, but — you never know — they might just call by during your visit.
Find movie magic at Francis Ford Coppola’s scenic series of retreats from Belize to Basilicata, Robert de Niro’s legendary Tribeca lair in New York City and more A-list-created hotels that get you a little closer to Hollywood, plus a Spetses stay that has seen some behind-the-scenes action…
PALAZZO TALÌA
Rome
The acclaimed Italian director Luca Guadagnino — whose film hits include A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name and Zendaya’s Challengers — has applied his considerable aesthetic skills to hotels, to help create the visually pleasing Palazzo Talìa in Rome, a literal art house. The interiors are a series of perfect cinematic vignettes, with frescoes, friezes and classical sculptures all stepping as extras.
Going back into the annals of antiquity, the palazzo’s past extends considerably further than its current sumptuous, seductive and highly saturated incarnation — in Ancient Rome, this is where the Aqua Virgo aqueduct once ran. In the Renaissance, the secretary to Pope Leo X de’ Medici built a house on this site. The palazzo was later home to patricians and prelates, before becoming a school for the poor. If these walls could talk, they’d have a Hollywood blockbuster in no time.
THE GREENWICH HOTEL
New York City
He may now co-own hundreds of hotels around the world, thanks to his unstoppable Nobu brand, but Robert de Niro’s humble hotelier beginnings were at home in New York City. The Greenwich Hotel is in Tribeca, a once low-key neighbourhood that now has some of the most expensive square footage in the city (and that’s saying something).
The actor’s father, Robert de Niro Snr, was an artist in his own right and the walls of the hotel and its Tribeca Grill restaurant are graced by his works. Helpfully for tourists passing through who are keen to get a temporary taste of life as a New Yorker, the library, courtyard, pool and spa are all guest-only, making this Big Apple basecamp feel like your own. And when the insomniac Big Apple buzz gets a little much, simply retreat to the hotel’s lantern-lit Japanese spa, crafted from bamboo.
PALAZZO MARGHERITA
Basilicata
The Oscar-winning director of The Godfather first turned his sights on hotels when he bought the abandoned Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize back in the early Eighties, using it as a private retreat for his family before welcoming the public to his paradise in 1993. Coppola soon expanded the Family Coppola Hideaways to include La Lancha in Guatemala, Turtle Inn and Coral Caye in Belize, and Be Jardín Escondido in Argentina. There’s even the aptly named All-Movie Hotel in the US.
The family’s hotel collection now also reaches Coppola’s ancestral land of Italy. His grandfather emigrated to the USA in 1904, but would often talk about the motherland. On the director’s first visit to the 15th-century hilltop town of Bernalda in southern Italy in his early twenties, he instantly saw why. In 2011, his director daughter Sofia got married at the clan’s meticulously restored Palazzo Margherita before it opened as a hotel, fully restored to glory, a year later.
Film fans on their own pilgrimage should also look 45 minutes north to photogenic Matera, which has been used as a filming location for countless productions – most famously during a rather explosive Bond scene starring Daniel Craig in No Time to Die.
THE BRANDO
French Polynesia
Marlon Brando first caught sight of the volcanic atoll of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific in 1960, on a location scout for his upcoming film Mutiny on the Bounty. He made the 30-mile trip from Tahiti to be met by Madame Duran (and her 40 cats and dogs) who owned the coconut plantation and her rifle, though she was eventually charmed into selling up six years later (for US$270,000, in case you’re a Millennial and would like to weep).
The Oscar-winning actor used it as his personal paradise for decades. After his death, his friend and business partner Richard Bailey bought it from his estate and turned it into a private-island playground. The Brando occupies just one of the 12 isles of the atoll, with the others left untouched.
Cinephiles may not usually find themselves discussing The Godfather and Moana in the same breath, but here in Tetiaroa, where the Disney crew came in search of inspiration, they’re beautiful bedfellows. Brando — who loved his Polynesian retreat so much, his ashes are scattered here — said it best: ‘Tetiaroa is beautiful beyond my capacity to describe. It is really beyond the capacity of cinematography to translate.’
GOLDENEYE
Jamaica
The novelist who gave us Bond was a big fan of Jamaica; so much so that he created the world’s most famous spy right here at GoldenEye, setting the wheels in motion for cinema’s most enduring saga. More specifically, the handsome hero’s origin story began within the four walls of the estate’s Ian Fleming Villa. We like to think several martinis were involved.
Fleming designed the 52-acre retreat in Oracabessa on the island’s north coast in the Fifties and it was soon hosting writers, musicians and politicians. Today, it’s owned by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and is ever popular with celebrities, including (naturally) Nineties James Bond himself, Pierce Brosnan.
POSEIDONION GRAND HOTEL
Spetses
Along with Succession and The White Lotus, one of the recent productions helping to add fuel to wanderlust fire is the Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery franchise, where the photogenic cast is helped along by equally attractive backdrops. In a case of nominative determinism, this hotel with an allium in its title starred in the second instalment. The 110-year-old Poseidonion Grand Hotel, on the harbour in Saronic isle Spetses, hosted Daniel Craig, Edward Norton and Janelle Monáe in 2021. It also appeared in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, an adaption of an Elena Ferrante novel starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley.
Dedicated fans of the Glass Onion murder mysteries will also find intrigue in the Peloponnese, at Amanzoe’s Villa 20, which is another Greek retreat to have been graced by Craig’s Benoit Blanc and co.
Tinseltown calling? See the actual Hollywood hideaways in our Los Angeles collection