Press

With an electric band of celebrity fans - including Frank Skinner, Kate Moss, and Dave Stewart - this is the most fashionable hotel in the Caribbean. A paean to Italian chic, it's owned by an ex-Prada consultant, who decked out the rooms with Balinese antiques and infinity pools. An Asian0inspried spa opened this year.

October 2011 ( Page 123 )

Sicilian chef Benedetto LaFiura was raised in the kitchens of Taormina. and he remains close to the lesson of his youth. preparing savory Mediterranean pastas and elegantly simple seafood dishes. But by adding international invention such as Thai black rice to a seafood plate or wasabi vinaigrette to a shrimp dish, he elevates his traditional repertoire to an entirely new and satisfying plane. Especially noteworthy is his eponymous seafood dish, studded with shrimp, crab and scallops and served in a rich red sauce with risotto; the herb-crusted dolphin in lemon-butter sauce; and the peppercorn filet mignon-a carnivore's fantasy. The open, thatch-roofed dining room is smack-dab on a strip of deserted beach, so the stars and surf are a side dish with every meal. Sixteen secluded suites are also on hand. just in case the fine wine list gets the better of you

( 473-439-0001; entrees, $20-$40 )

May 2001 ( Page 184 )

Laluna's brightly-coloured one and two-bedroom cottages trickle down a hillside to the beach and sport a funky chic designed to lure a whole new crowd of voguish visitors to Grenada.

Laluna is the brainchild and first hotel project of Italian fashion maven Bernardo Bertucci. The resort's free standing cottages of jaunty purple, green and yellow feature private plunge pools and bamboo-roofed verandas with Balinese day beds and thick cane rockers overlooking the sea.

Gabriella Giuntoli, who has designed villas for the likes of Giorgio Armani, provides a "concrete chic" of dappled amber, mauve and russet walls, built-in counters and couches and swirling floor designs covered by simple straw rugs.

Four poster beds are swathed in white fabric and piled with soft pillows. Baseline lamps feature bundles of bamboo "growing" through angular shades. The ceiling are immensely high; windows, trimmed in bold primary colors, look through manchineel trees and a kaleidoscopic of bougainvillea to the sea.

Place a half calabash on the porch carved with "Do Not Disturb" and Laluna's crescent moon logo, and it's time to luxuriate with Laluna's herbal cleansing gel and shampoo from Hortus Fratis, an Italian company whose products are fashioned by monks in the Italian Alps.

Outside your room, relax on an oversized settee among an assortment of white-cushioned couches and chairs and Balinese sculptures in the open-air, thatched roof loungs. The entire Polynesian-Caribbean-Italian melange opens to the emerald sea. Stroll past the pool to the al fresco restaurant, where Italian chef Benedetto La Furia melds the tropics with his native cuisine in such dishes as seafood gnocchi, local lobster tossed in olive oil and "seafood Benedetto" - shrimp, crab, scallops and fish in a rich red sauce accompanied by risotto. Want a touch of the ast? Try the Tahi pumpkin-pinger soup or spicy peanut chicken curry. And how many island tipplers start with a "Caribbean Seabreeze" and finish up with a potent Mediterrean Grappa di Brunello?

Best of all, laluna has an utter lack of presumption, beginning from the minute the van picks you up at the airport. You'll find not a trace of "aren't we hip" posing at the friendly resort, and you're very likely to find Bertucci or his wife and manager Wendy Potter, a native of nearby Trinidad, greeting guests. After dinner, you'll climb the steps to your cottages as the moon rises over a dark Caribbean and its sliver of light gracefully tells you why this Italian hoteiler chose the name "Laluna".

APRIL/MAY 2001 (Pg.184)

Grenada Laluna Resort which opened in December on the Caribbean island of Grenada, is the brainchild of Bernardo Bertucci, a former public relations consultant to the Italian fashion industry. His financial backing came from friends at Benetton and Zegna; the design is by Carmelina Santoro and Gabriella Giuntoli, who counts Giorgio Armani among her clients. Not surprisingly, Laluna has a beautiful hihg-fashion look. Sixteen brightly colored villas are dotted acrss a hill. Their interiors are painted warm cinnamon and sienna tones and furnished with hand-carved Balinese wood fourposters and silk pillows. The communcal open-air living room is thatched with elephant grass and accessorized with more Indonesian furniture and eclectic finds from other parts of Asia. Though highly designed, the resort, refreshingly, has no haughty attitude. Instead this is the sort of simple place that rarely exists in the Caribbean anymore; a place to go just to relax on a small beach in a private cove. There is blissfully little to do, with the exception of lazing in your plunge pool. DEPARTURE MAY/JUNE (Pg.58)

We Are Creating an Experience

Workmen are tromping on a makeshift path about a foot away. Plus, the pump on our plunge pool isn't working, so we break for lunch.

We are the lone dinners in the open-air restaurant, which looks as if it seats about 50. The Italian chef still has jet lag-he arrived two days before we did-so there's no menu, but he manages to pull together a three-course meal of antipasto, linguine, and swordfish with red sauce, served by a gaggle of waiters.

A sail around the spectacular cove on a Hobie Cat aids our digestion, and just as we return to shore, a waiter approaches to take our drink orders. It appears that the blender isn't working or hasn't arrived, so we settle for Carib beer.

I silently wish that every hotel kept a staff-to-guest ratio of 19 to two. I also wonder whether this is the first Caribbean resort in history that doesn't have a functional blender.

By our third evening, however, things are taking off. The areas around the pool have been swept clean, a gift shop has materialized, and someone has installed a small hose on the main patio for rinsing sandy feet (beats using the plunge pool). The biggest triumph? A blender! Bertucci approaches us with a freshly printed drink menu. "You see?" he says proudly. "we are making progress." It's true-Laluna may have had a slow start, but it's coming together fast. And especially compared with the larger, more garish hotels on the island, the place is a jewel. As we comment on the vast improvements of the past three days, Bertucci breaks into a wide smile. " I knew it! You have the best resort on the island all to yourself. I should be charging you double!"

FEBRUARY 2001 (Pg.232)

Forget St.Barts and Pink Sands. This year the bold-faced and beautiful are flocking to Laluna, Grenada's super-stylish retreat in the West Indies with a mere 16 oceanfront villas (each with its own private plunge pool, natch).

Interior designer Gabriella Giuntoil (who counts Giorgio Armani among her clients) has paired Meditarrean-inspired colours with breezy Caribbean motif: split-level verandahs and gauzy net bedding. Guests will appreciate extras such as yoga classes and in-room massages, not to mention the thatched roof Sunset Bar decked out with Indonesian daybeds for maximum lounging. Shoes are discouraged. - JF

MARCH 2001 (pg.128)

Forget St. Barts and Pink Sands. This year the bold-faced and the beautiful are flocking to LaLuna, Grenada's super-stylish retreat in the West Indies with a mere 16 oceanfront villas (each with its own private plunge pool, natch). Interior designer Gabriella Giuntoli (who counts Giorgio Armani among her clients) has paired Mediterranean-inspired colors with breezy Caribbean motif: split-level verandahs and gauzy net bedding.

Guests will appreciate extras such as yoga classes and in-room massages, not to mention the thatched roof Sunset Bar decked out with Indonesian daybeds for maximum lounging. Shoes are discouraged.-JF

Under the stars in Grenada, plus pre-flight pampering. By Francesca Martin, Laluna is a magical hotel set in a secluded bay on the island of Grenada. Combine the Italian enthusiasm and charm of its owner, Bernardo Bertucci, with the Caribbean welcome and relaxed way of life, and you will have some idea of its allure. In fact, when Kate Phelan, Vogue's senior fashion editor, returned to London from shooting Angela Lindvall with photographer Corinne Day for Castaway (July 2001), she declared it the best hotel she'd stayed at in years.

Laluna is made up of 16 one and two-bedroomed cottages, each with a canopied bed, a private deck and a plunge pool - from which you can smell scented frangipani trees and enjoy panoramic views of the bay. The cottages are stylishly decorated with Balinese furniture and they all feature a partially exposed bathroom, so you can wash beneath the stars. At the heart of the hotel is the infinity swimming pool, with its surrounding cocktail bar, and the small restaurant, which serves top-notch Italian food and fresh fish. Everything you might want is at your disposal - from a massage to scuba diving (highly recommended is a trip to one of the local jazz festivals). Small enough to feel utterly romantic and with the friendliest staff, La Luna doesn't really feel like a hotel, more like a friend's wonderful house.
October

Laluna has a look and vibe that would suit Armani

I'll be honest: My wife and I were leery when we saw the last stretch of road to Laluna, a quarter-mile-long, impossibly runneled chunk of Caribbean dirt with more ruts than Keith Richard's face. It was enough to make us wonder if conditions had improved in Grenada since "the intervention", as locals call the 1983 American-led invasion that made the island safe again for banana daiquiris and cinch medical degrees. Indeed, as Laluna co-manager Wendy Potter, the wife of proprietor Bernardo Bertucci, puts it, "Even now we get calls from America asking, 'Is the war still going on?'".

Happily, Grenada has been at peace for two decades now, and in Laluna it has one of the region's most tempting hideaways, a tiny yet tony gem (maximum guests: 32) that's well worth the chauffeured schlep over a rutted road. Carved into an oleander- and hibiscus-scented hillside above a nearly deserted beach, Laluna is the brainchild of Bertucci, a 39-year-old Italian by way of New York City, where he spent 10 years in the fashion industry as a consultant to Giorgio Armani, La Perla and Prada. It's no coincidence that his 16 cottages - cool concrete dusted in shades of blue, green and cinnamon - are the work of the same designer who did Armani's European vacation villa.

On an island that was named by the Spanish, ruled by the French and colonized by the English, it makes perfect sense that Grenada's most stylish hideaway would be run by Italian's, who have brought a distinctly global flavor. "Everything here has a story," Bertucci says. The teak four-poster beds, hand-carved bathroom mirrors and kooky crotch-grabbing fertility symbols? Bertucci handpicked them in Bali. The Medusa-style light fixtures and exotic bath creams? Imported from Italy. Why, Bertucci even thatched the open-air bar and restaurant with 30,000 pounds of elephant grass direct from Vietnam.

Guests can embark on excursions to the rain forest, visit the Saturday spice market in nearby St. George's and take spins on a Hobie Cat, kayak or mountain bike. Or they can do what we did: lounge on the beach, enjoy in-room massages and watch the sunset from our private plunge pool overlooking the sea.

Nighttime brings a new cast of characters. There's chef Benedetto La Fiura, whose Sicilian specialties (with a Caribbean twist) put the fare at Tony Soprano's favorite restaurant to shame. There's Wilton, the dreadlocked David Blaine of barmen, who can entrance you with an industrial-strength rum punch and a bulging bag of parlor tricks.

Two years after its launch Laluna has turned into a hot spot among in-the-know fashionistas, to say nothing of urban hipsters from New York, London and Milan who want to avoid the tourist hordes that overrun the neighboring islands. (Model Jerry Hall and former Eurythmics member Dave Stewart are two recent guests.) Best of all, Laluna is proof positive that you don't need a flamethrowing, drumbanging floor show to have a memorable Caribbean vacation. Good food, a gorgeous setting and a chill vibe: Another U.S. invasion may be coming, only this time it won't be the Marines.

Winter 2003

Despite having only a few luxury hotels Grenada still attracts big-name celebrities looking to escape for a while. Here is where the fashionistas take in the vistas...

The hotel that is currently on every celeb's lips is Laluna (www.laluna.com) located on the south west of the island. There are 16 one or two-bedroom cottages scattered across the hillside, hidden by jasmine and bougainvillea, all overlooking the hotel's pretty private bay. It was opened earlier this year by Bernardo Bertucci, an Italian who used to work as fashion consultant for Armani, Prada and La Perla. One of his great friends is Donatella Versace, who has already been to stay - as have Dave Stewart (who is rumored to have hired the whole hotel for Christmas), Jerry Hall, Frank Skinner and Kate Moss. It has also been reported that Madonna has sent one of her scouts to check the place out.

Guests like the day beds and dip pools on their private terraces, and the Indonesian-inspired chick décor - think four-poster Balinese beds, crisp linens, seagrass matting and ethnic carvings. Make a beeline for Goldie, who will guide you through all the watersports on offer, and the charismatic Italian chef who serves up mouth-watering pastas and pizza.

NOVEMBER 2001

The hotel currently on every celebrity's lips is Laluna, located on the south-west coast of Grenada. Guests stay in one of the 16 one or two-bedroom cottages scattered across the hillside, hidden by jasmine and bouganivillaea, that overlook the hotel's pretty private bay. It was opened earlier this year by Bernardo Bertucci, a former New York-based Italian fashion consultant for Armani, Prada and La Perla. One of his great friends, Donatella Versace, has already been to stay, as have Date Stewart, Jerry Hall, Frank Skinner and Kate Moss (pictured). Dave Stewart gave an impromptu concert to the resort's guests, in tribute to the late George Harrison.

Guests can recline on day beds and cool off in dip pools on their private terraces, amid the Indonesian-inspired decor. make a beeline for Goldie, who will guide your through all the water sports on offer, and the charismatic Italian chef who serves up mouth-watering pastas and pizza.

Caribouts (020 7751 0660) offers a seven-night package, including flights and transfers, from GBP 1369pp.

JANUARY 2002

Juliet Kinsman meets the yoga guru behind a Caribbean holiday that will not only have you feeling your best but doing good for the local community too.

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