OKU Ibiza

OKU Ibiza

On the edge of Cala Gració, a cove on the west coast of Ibiza a few minutes from Sant Antoni de Portmany and about twenty minutes from the airport, OKU Ibiza occupies a hotel that began life as a Casa Cook resort in 2019, was orphaned that same year when Thomas Cook collapsed, and was bought and rebuilt by the investment firm Westfort Capital, reopening under the OKU name in 2021. The redesign, carried out in two phases by the Ibiza-based studio MG&AG, kept the original building and added a new wing, arriving at 184 rooms and suites plus a standalone four-bedroom villa with its own pool. In 2022 the Belgian entrepreneur Marc Coucke, through his investment vehicle Alychlo, bought a 50 percent stake in the OKU Leisure Group from Westfort, so the hotel now answers to an investment partnership rather than a single hotelier family. The material palette holds together: poured concrete, red cedar sun-screens on the facade, rattan headboards, oak floors, linen upholstery, coconut-fibre mattresses instead of standard foam. Bathrooms are open-plan with black fittings and Le Labo toiletries, and every room carries a Marshall speaker in place of a generic sound system. The art is site-specific rather than stock, including commissions from the Los Angeles painter and sculptor Steve Tepas. Food runs across two rooms, OKU Restaurant and To Kima, both under executive chef Mark Vaessen, who arrived from SUSHISAMBA and brought a Japanese-Mediterranean register heavy on raw fish and open flame. There are four pools on the property, including one of the largest on the island, kept adults-only, plus a semi-private pool serving six swim-up rooms, a spa, a fitness studio, and a juice bar for the mornings after. What it feels like, once you are past reception and into the grounds, is a hotel built for people who want Ibiza's daytime pool culture and its DJ sets without the density of San Antonio's strip nearby: Bali beds for the live pool sessions that run through summer, a build-your-own breakfast bowl bar rather than a full buffet, yoga before the heat sets in. It suits couples and small groups who want proximity to the island's nightlife economy without living inside it, and who are content paying resort rates for a design product rather than a small independent house; this is a bigger, more produced operation than "boutique" usually implies, closer to a resort with an art direction than a farmhouse with a family history. You should not come here for quiet: OKU runs a live pool programme all summer, with DJs and performers, and the adults-only pool exists precisely because the main one gets loud. You should not come for old Ibiza either, the hippy-market, finca version of the island, because this is a package-holiday-era hotel rebuilt as a design object, not a house with provenance. You should come for the pool programme itself, for Vaessen's kitchen, for rooms that carry through the material discipline rather than gesturing at it, and for a position on the quieter west side of Sant Antoni that still puts the island's clubs a short taxi away. The short version: A 184-room design hotel in Cala Gració, west Ibiza, rebuilt from a failed Casa Cook by Westfort Capital and relaunched in 2021, with Mark Vaessen's kitchen, Steve Tepas's art, and one of the island's largest pools doing the work that boutique intimacy usually does elsewhere.