Robert De Niro’s New Nobu Hotel in the Caribbean Is Close to His Heart

It’s odd enough to find yourself traveling by helicopter from one Caribbean island to another for lunch, even if your destination is Nobu Barbuda, an outpost of the famous restaurant plunked down on a semi-deserted beach. It’s odd in a different way to arrive and spot the 81-year-old actor Robert De Niro dressed in a pair of shorts and a tiny bucket hat, waiting for you at a table in the back.

But this is his restaurant, and soon it will be his new resort, the Nobu Beach Inn, scheduled to open at the end of the year. Aimed at high-end travelers willing to part with upward of $2,500 a night for a one-bedroom bungalow, it’s the latest project in Mr. De Niro’s ever-expanding hospitality empire that began when he and a partner opened the Tribeca Grill in Manhattan in 1990.

In 1994, Mr. De Niro helped persuade the acclaimed Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa, whose Matsuhisa restaurant in Beverly Hills had become a celebrity favorite, to open a branch in Manhattan — and to bestow upon it his first rather than last name. More Nobu restaurants followed, and in 2013, the first Nobu Hotel opened at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Now Nobu Hospitality, comprising Mr. De Niro, Mr. Matsuhisa and the film producer Meir Teper, has an international portfolio of 42 hotels that are already open or are in development, as well as 12 residential developments and 56 restaurants. (Separately, Mr. De Niro is also a partner in the Greenwich Hotel in New York.)

But this current project is particularly close to Mr. De Niro’s heart, as well as being the only hotel in the Nobu empire in which he has a direct ownership stake, through an entity he co-founded, Paradise Found Barbuda LLC. (The other hotels operate under Nobu management and licensing agreements but are individually owned.) The Nobu Beach Inn is meant to be upscale yet homey, understated yet exclusive, geared toward the sort of people who “don’t want to feel that they’re surrounded by other people,” Daniel Shamoon, Paradise Found Barbuda’s managing partner, said.

How has Mr. De Niro found the time to do all this, in addition to his putative day job?

“Oh, that,” Mr. De Niro said, laughing, when asked how his acting career fits into this other part of his life. “I’ve done a few things that are going to come out, and I have other projects in the works that haven’t been finalized. And I also have this.” He gestured toward the beach. Being a hotel and restaurant mogul isn’t more fun than being an actor, exactly, he said — it’s just different. “Acting is just another task, if you will,” Mr. De Niro said.

He answered his phone, momentarily distracted. “Sorry,” he said, after putting it down. “I was coordinating a helicopter.”

It has taken much coordinating — of helicopters and other things — for Mr. De Niro and his Paradise Found partners, the Australian billionaire James Packer and Mr. Shamoon, an international hotelier who is also the co-owner and director of Luxury Hotel Partners, to get to this point. Paradise Found acquired the 391-acre property in 2015, paying $5.2 million for a 99-year lease.

Mr. De Niro first visited Barbuda, which is smaller than Brooklyn and rests about 38 miles north of Antigua, its larger partner in the nation of Antigua and Barbuda, on a day trip some 30 years ago. He was struck by the beauty of its most famous beach, a stretch of pinkish sand and turquoise water along the southwest coast. (The beach was later named Princess Diana Beach in honor of Diana, the former Princess of Wales, who in 1997 was photographed sitting by the pool at the now-defunct K Club resort.)

“I always thought it was something special,” Mr. De Niro said. “And I said, ‘This is the spot if we can get it.’”

The Nobu Barbuda restaurant, the first step in the development plan, opened in 2020, catering almost exclusively to people taking day trips by helicopter or boat from neighboring islands. The menu features Nobu classics like black cod with miso as well as local additions like Barbuda lobster. (Prices are New York-style: an order of beef tenderloin with teriyaki, for instance, costs $66.)

Nobu Beach Inn is being built on the site of the K Club, whose owner, the Italian fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli, founded the Krizia fashion house and was credited with inventing hot pants. While the K Club’s old structures were destroyed by Hurricane Irma in 2017, the skeleton of the swimming pool remains, and is to be rebuilt and zhuzhed up for the new hotel.

Mr. De Niro has a house of his own not far away — it belonged to the K Club’s architect — so he is on hand often to go over plans and consult with his team about design and décor.

Local opposition

The partners emphasized that they have the blessing of the government, which this fall demonstrated its enthusiasm for development to outsiders by opening a new $14 million international airport catering to private planes and small charter aircraft. “It’s a great spot for people on the East Coast or even a place like Chicago to fly in for the weekend,” Mr. De Niro said.

Mr. De Niro and his partners say that they have been working to ensure that the resort is built with respect for Barbuda’s ecosystem — as well as fortified against future hurricanes.

“We’re applying lessons from Irma to the way we’re building this property,” Katy Horne, Paradise Found’s managing director, said. The design and construction are adhering to the Miami-Dade hurricane building code standards, with one-story buildings set back far from the flood plain. Dunes, along with mangroves and other vegetation, will serve as protection from winds and water surges, she said.

Privacy, the ultimate luxury

In his latest role, in a Netflix mini-series called “Zero Day,” streaming in February, Mr. De Niro plays a former U.S. president racing against the clock to discover the perpetrators of a crippling cyberattack before they strike again.

Here on Barbuda in November, the actor was leading a tour of his hotel construction site, along with Mr. Shamoon, Ms. Horne and Trevor Horwell, the chief executive of Nobu Hospitality.

The hotel will have 36 bedrooms in 17 guest bungalows, as well as 25 privately owned beachfront villas that can be rented out to guests at the owners’ discretion.

The units will all have private swimming pools and so much lush landscaping that the guests will feel “as though they are on their own property,” Ms. Horne said.

As for the privately owned villas, they are to range in size from 4,500 to 6,000 square feet, and to be cocooned by 24 feet of landscaping on both sides for total privacy. They will soon be on the market, priced at $12 million or more apiece.

The resort will have all the accouterments the luxury class has come to expect, including a staff member dedicated to each party whose job is to “oversee every detail of their stay and design tailored experiences,” Ms. Horne said.

No guest will ever need to “vie for a waiter’s attention,” Mr. Shamoon said. “The idea is that you’re at home, not at a hotel, and that wherever you are, you can do whatever you like.”

When the hotel opens, Mr. De Niro said, visitors can expect to see him around the property, just as they might run into him at the Greenwich Hotel in New York, with its intimate library and enclosed courtyard.

“We want that same cozy feeling, but the island version,” he said. “A place that’s comfortable, where everyone wants to gather.”

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