Not many people cite sheep as a reason for becoming a hotelier. But when Jeanette Thottrup and her husband, Claus, bought a home to renovate in Tuscany in 2000 it wasn’t quite the rural idyll she expected. “I knew that if I heard one more baaaaa, I’d go mad,” the Danish former fashion designer says. “One minute I was an urban working woman, the next I was in Tuscany surrounded by nothing but sheep. Either we had to move — or turn the house into something else.”
Seventeen years later, Borgo Santo Pietro has become one of Tuscany’s best-loved boutique hotels. Its grounds have also been put to good use. Eggs are collected from charming chicken houses, fruit and nuts picked from the orchards, honey collected from hives and flowers grown and arranged by a full-time florist. Even the products in the spa are made in a new on-site beauty lab. “What I hadn’t realised,” says Jeanette, with a rueful grin, “is that you don’t just make a hotel and that’s it. There’s always something you can do to make a guest’s experience more fabulous. Last year it was new suites. Next year it’s a huge new spa. And this year it’s our yacht, Satori.”
When energetic, creative couples such as the Thottrups — who have developed elegant mega-villas for oligarchs and hotels such as the Franklin in Knightsbridge — mention that they have a yacht, what is certain is that it isn’t going to be any old tub. “What we didn’t want was a floating caravan, a Knightsbridge-by-the-sea type of showy motorboat,” says Jeanette. “We wanted something that Agatha Christie might have dreamt up, that evoked the romance of sailing in the 1920s and 1930s.”
Stepping on board the schooner, moored an hour’s drive from their Tuscan hotel, it is immediately clear that this boat was designed in part by a Scandinavian woman. The interiors are understated and elegant, with Danish-style furniture and soft natural fabrics. They’re also airy and comfortable.
“I told Claus that I wasn’t sailing if it was going to be like camping,” Jeanette says, flicking back her long blond hair. Which explains why the bathrooms are lined in inch-thick marble and the beds are king-sized. Also, why the deck-top kitchen is open-plan, so you can watch the chef from their Michelin-starred restaurant in action.
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The idea of buying a yacht for hotel guests came about because they realised that the most sensational coastal places were accessible only by boat. “Look at Amalfi, Capri, Portofino,” Claus says. “If you have a boat there, fantastic. If not, it’s a problem.”
The other problem was that, even when they did want to sail, they couldn’t find a boat they really wanted to charter — something glamorous, old-fashioned, with sails, that gave them all the comforts of their own hotel with the excitement of a superyacht. So they designed one themselves — a mahogany hull powered by 1,000 sq m of sail and two 600BHP engines, with five spacious double en suite bedrooms. The yacht broker Edmiston classifies it as one of the three most elegant sailing vessels on the seas.
Unlike many other yachts we spot bobbing in turbulent seas, Satori glides through the waves. “I’ve sailed all my life,” Claus says, “so seas don’t bother me. But they bother Jeanette — and we wanted it to suit guests who’d never sailed before. So she’s as stable as a sailing yacht can be.”
The yacht is also fabulously high-tech. As well as wifi, a Sonos sound-system and tablets loaded with the Thottrups’ little black book of coastal attractions, the boat has a navy tender, an optimist sailing boat, wakeboards, jet-skis, kayaks and seabobs as well as G3 Gocycles — the Lamborghini of electric bikes — for on-shore exploration.
Having sailed to Elba for a couple of hours — a blissfully quiet experience under sail without motors — we harbour in a bay. A table is set up on the front deck for massages. Seabobs are launched and wakeboard lessons given. Then, after a meal cooked in front of us by Borgo’s chef, Andrea Mattei, a screen is erected on the front deck, with wireless headphones, so we can lie on cushions under soft blankets and the stars, sipping a sublime brunello from Claus’s prized on-board cellar while watching a film.
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We are the second group of clients to test Satori; the first were so bowled over that they’ve optioned time next year, perhaps to try another region. The yacht can sail anywhere in Europe — and even the Caribbean, if there’s demand. Which I’m sure there will be. As we sail out of Elba’s waters, two other yachts sail alongside us and their occupants start clapping, yelling: “Bravo!”
“That makes me more proud than anything else,” says Claus. “Obviously, we think it’s beautiful. But it’s great to see that other people do too.”
Like the Thottrups, the owners of Blue Deer, Stefano and Giorgia Barbini, didn’t intend to be hoteliers either — or to have a boat. Fed up with the fashion world, after decades at Escada, they started to take paying guests in their Dolomites home. Two years ago, having made the San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge into one of the most luxurious hosted mountain villas in Italy, they felt it would be wonderful to expand to somewhere by the sea. There was a hitch, though. They thought beach holidays were boring. “I don’t want to go to the sea and look at it,” says Stefano, as he drives me from Rome airport to the sea. “I want to be out exploring it.”
When Stefano’s father-in-law — who runs the fashion company Brioni — asked Stefano to accompany him to a shipyard where he was having a catamaran built, the penny dropped. “I phoned Giorgia and said, ‘We have our new hotel. It’s a boat.’ ”
Today, Blue Deer is one of only seven 74ft catamarans in the world, and the only one of its class to be run as a private floating hotel. Like Satori it is available for charter by groups of up to eight guests. But while Satori is a classic yacht, Blue Deer is the Armani of the boat world, with its sleek white lines and sails, contemporary, clean-lined white cabins and acres of space. Like the couple’s Mountain Lodge, the decor is stylish and sympathetic to its environment. The kitchen is adorned with pots of living herbs, an integral part of the traditional meals made by the Puglian chef Paolo (which may include sea urchin spaghetti and dark chocolate fondant). At night the tables are laid with elegant white Italian crockery and glasswear, and silver lanterns are lit on the wooden deck. There are even concealed televisions in the bedrooms.
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Of course, what makes Blue Deer special is that it can go pretty much anywhere guests want from its moorings in the pretty town of Gaeta, on the coast between Naples and Rome. At present the Barbinis have routes in three suggested areas — the volcanic Aeolian islands, the north coast of Sardinia (away from the crowded south) and the Pontine islands (north of Capri). Each of them, Stefano says, is not just charming, but also — discounting August — incredibly quiet. “You can see Italy as it used to be,” he says. “You can find fishermen who still talk in a dialect hardly anyone understands, learn to pick capers, taste wine from vineyards that don’t sell anywhere else and, of course, eat the best mozzarella in the world.”
In two days, sailing with him and his crew to the islands of Ponza and Palmarola, we see a little-visited region of Italy in almost total privacy. At night we moor in quiet bays walled by dramatic volcanic cliffs, dine under the moon on seafood pasta and fine south Italian wine and fall asleep to the lap of the waves. By day we use the boat’s dinghy to get to tiny pastel-painted villages where water is still caught in Roman cisterns, to explore massive stone arches and caves, and to swim in clear blue waters with not another person in sight.
“There is nothing as wonderful as sailing,” Stefano says. “How else can you enjoy the world in almost total silence — and privacy — and go where you want, when you want? Hotels are great. But boats are even better.”
Satori can be chartered through borgosantopietro.com from €100,000 a week, charter only, or €130,000 a week with food and fuel. Blue Deer costs from €36,500 a week, plus an additional 20 per cent for food, fuel and VAT (sanlorenzolodges.com)
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