Splendido, Portofino — the Season After the Spectacle

The first season after a reopening is about the press. The second is about the guests.

Splendido, A Belmond Hotel reopened on June 7, 2025, after a renovation by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio that touched nearly everything above the harbor: rooms and suites rebuilt around hand-painted ceilings and gilded lighting, a new bar called Baratta Sedici — named for the baron who first turned the property from a ransacked monastery into a private villa in the nineteenth century — and Italy's first permanent Dior Spa. Three weeks later came Villa Beatrice, a three-floor Gothic Revival and Art Nouveau house on the grounds, restored down to its ceiling frescoes and offered as Belmond's most private booking on the hill.

That whole sequence, reopening to villa, arrived inside one heavily covered month. This is the hotel's second full summer since, and the calendar this time is quieter: no ribbon, no press week, just the ordinary traffic of a Riviera August. Which is, in a sense, the more honest test. A renovation can look extraordinary in the photographs commissioned to launch it. Whether it was worth doing shows up later, in what a paying guest notices without being told to.

Splendido has had an unusual amount of practice at exactly this transition. It opened as a hotel in the first years of the twentieth century, inside a building the Benedictine monks who first held it eventually abandoned to Saracen raids. By the 1950s and '60s it was the address where Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall spent their Riviera summers — glamour that long ago stopped needing a marketing department. La Terrazza still serves a spaghetti with tomato sauce as a standing homage to Taylor, a dish that has outlasted several owners, at least one closure and now one very large renovation.

What Brudnizki's work has to prove, this second time around, is not that the villa photographs well. It's that a hundred-and-twenty-year-old hotel still knows how to be unremarkable in the best sense — the kind of place regulars return to without needing anything new to talk about. Portofino itself has never had that problem. The harbor, the pastel houses, the walk up to Castello Brown — none of it was renovated, and none of it needed to be. The hotel above it just spent a year and a great deal of money trying to earn the same kind of permanence.

— Camille