Il Castelfalfi

Il Castelfalfi

In the municipality of Montaione, roughly an hour's drive from Florence and twenty minutes from San Gimignano, a hilltop borgo that first appeared on a map in 754 AD has been two decades in the making as a resort. The village of Castelfalfi traces its name to a Lombard named Faolfo, who fortified the hill in the eighth century, and its subsequent ownership includes the Medici family, who renovated the castle and built an adjacent hunting lodge in the fifteenth century, and, after the village's long post-war abandonment, Germany's TUI Group, which paid $350 million beginning in 2007 to transform what was essentially a ghost town into a functioning resort. In 2021, Sri Prakash Lohia, the founder of Singapore-based Indorama Corporation and a collector of rare books and hand-coloured lithographs, acquired the entire 1,100-hectare tenuta through his family's Incorp Holdings and funded a further multi-million-dollar renovation that reopened in 2023. The estate, which spans 2,700 acres of vineyards, olive groves, cypress woodland, and lakes, now operates 146 rooms, suites, and villas across two hotel buildings, a converted early-twentieth-century tobacco warehouse, and a handful of farmhouses and private villas dotted through the grounds. The interiors of the main hotel building were redesigned in the 2023 renovation by two firms working in parallel, the Italian studio Caberlon Caroppi handling the guestrooms, junior suites, and suite terraces, and the Paris-based Affine Design overseeing the four signature suites and grand suites, which run to 55 to 60 square metres with travertine marble bathrooms, Stefano Ricci toiletries, and floor-to-ceiling windows that do the primary decorative work. The tobacco warehouse, the Tabaccaia, holds 31 rooms with white-painted wooden beams and a quieter, more grounded atmosphere than the main building across the lane. At the top of the medieval castle, the Stefano Ricci La Rocca penthouse, a 307-square-metre two-bedroom apartment designed by the Florentine luxury house with Murano crystal chandeliers and curtains from the Antico Setificio Fiorentino, is available for those who want the full theatrical treatment. The food programme runs to six dining outlets: Olivina, in the main building, where Chef Davide De Simone oversees breakfast and dinner; Il Rosmarino, a trattoria with wood-fired pizza and a courtyard that stays open late; La Rocca in the castle, the fine-dining option with a tasting menu and wine pairings drawn largely from the estate's own 60 acres of vines; and Bar Ecrù, furnished with Paola Lenti lounge chairs on a terrace where the aperitivo hour is, by multiple accounts, where the property earns its most unconditional loyalty. The RAKxa Wellness Spa, one of only three RAKxa operations in the world alongside Bangkok and the St. Regis Aspen, has an indoor-outdoor infinity pool, hydrotherapy circuits, two saunas, and a team of therapists trained in Thai techniques using Biologique Recherche products. The 27-hole golf course, one of the largest in Tuscany and designed by architects Preißmann and Morode, was closed for renovation in early 2025. The scale of Castelfalfi is what takes getting used to. This is not a boutique hotel with careful edges; it is a village-turned-resort with its own gelateria, its own cashmere boutique, its own organic winery, a beekeeper, 10,000 olive trees, a Montessori-method kids club, an adventure park with a Tibetan bridge, a truffle-hunting programme with trained dogs, and over forty bookable experiences on any given day. The atmosphere is more Tuscan estate than hotel, which works if you embrace it and can feel exhaustingly programmatic if you don't. The views from the main building terraces and from Bar Ecrù are genuinely among the better ones available in this part of Tuscany, long and unimpeded across layered hills, and the sense of arriving somewhere with real medieval bones, cobblestones and a small Romanesque church and a botanical garden threaded through the borgo, gives the property a weight that a purpose-built resort cannot manufacture. The service is attentive and general-manager Roberto Protezione runs a tight operation, though the scale means it can feel corporate at the edges. You should not come if you want a small, owner-run property with a genuinely local feel, or if a hotel that also hosts weddings, family reunions, and corporate retreats would disturb your peace. The golf course renovation may be relevant if golf is the reason you are coming. You should come if what you want is a single base from which to do an enormous amount of Tuscany, including the estate itself, without moving. The combination of a serious food programme, a RAKxa spa, the best views in Montaione, and a working organic farm that produces the wine you drink at dinner is a particular kind of completeness that very few Tuscan properties actually manage. The short version: An 800-year-old Tuscan borgo, bought and transformed by TUI in 2007 and reimagined again by the Lohia family from 2021, with 146 rooms and villas, six restaurants, a RAKxa spa, 2,700 acres of organic farmland, and a medieval castle at its top.