Philippe Starck's A Serra retreat opens in Melides, Portugal, in 2028
Villas are already selling off-plan though the 25-suite hotel itself will not open for another two years.
Philippe Starck is opening A Serra, a hotel and village estate in the hills of Serra de Grândola near Melides, in Portugal's Alentejo region, in the second quarter of 2028. The 200-hectare development pairs a 25-suite hotel with 22 fully serviced private villas, restaurants, wellness facilities and creative studios gathered around a timber aldeia.
The residences are already being sold off-plan, with prices starting at six million dollars, well ahead of the hotel's own opening. Buyers get access to the hotel's concierge and housekeeping services, its restaurants, spa and creative programme, and its shared spaces year-round, according to the developer.
Starck says he first visited Portugal more than a decade ago and calls the encounter love at first sight, praising the Alentejo's people as proud, intelligent and kind. He later bought a second home in the region, a personal attachment he says now underpins the whole project.
A Serra is developed by Larfa Properties, the private real estate firm also behind Nhà Estate, Starck's first project in Vietnam. Developer Stéphane Delplancq describes A Serra as a living destination rather than a stand-alone hotel or residential development, built so a private home's intimacy meets a retreat's full service.
Lisbon studio Atelier AAVV, founded by Miguel Passos de Almeida, has led the building's planning and construction, while landscape architect Filipa Cardoso de Menezes of FC Arquitectura Paisagista has designed the grounds. Delplancq says the brief ruled out any gesture, nothing added and superfluous, that might compete with the site's hills and vegetation.
What the hotel and villas contain
The 25 hotel suites each measure 70 square metres inside with a 90 square metre terrace, and 12 of them come with a private pool. A central swimming pool and an indoor-outdoor bar are expected to anchor the shared areas, alongside a restaurant open to hotel guests and villa owners alike.
The 22 villas take the same visual language, adapted for long-term living. Starck compares them to ship or yacht cabins rising out of the terrain, concrete shells warmed inside with vegetation, terracotta, red-toned woods, natural leather and touches of gold, each detail meant to carry its own story.
The story built into the site
Starck says he always starts a project by writing a story that serves as its creative backbone. For A Serra he imagined a journey through orange-red cork forests, rice fields and lagoons, ending at geometric dwellings he likens to modernist sculptures, and inside them the traces of an absent writer and musician.
The couple's only clue, in Starck's telling, is a note left on a desk reading join me in the village, down below. That imagined departure became the organising idea for the aldeia, a modern take on the Portuguese village form set at the foot of the slope.
Mineral structures are uphill while the timber village is at the foot of the slope, its small buildings lining a raised main street between a farm-to-table restaurant, a vegetable garden, a market-style café and shop, an art studio and a swimming pool. Local artists and craftspeople will contribute to interiors that avoid literal regional pastiche.
The aldeia will also hold workshops for painting, pottery, sculpture, drawing and cooking, alongside a spa, a Yoga Shala, a children's garden, and tennis, padel and pétanque courts. Starck frames the whole programme as a refuge of living art rather than a conventional resort schedule.
Starck says he wants A Serra to feel as if it would have always existed, echoing his approach on other recent projects such as Brach Madrid and Maison Heler Metz, where storytelling has carried as much weight as construction detail. He calls the finished result a new kind of hospitality: highly specialised, thoughtful and personal.
No completion date has been given for the villas or the wider aldeia beyond the hotel's second quarter 2028 target, and the developer has not disclosed total investment figures or a schedule for further sales phases. What is confirmed is the six million dollar villa entry price and the 2028 hotel opening, the two dates buyers and future guests now have to plan around.
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Images: Courtesy of Philippe Starck); A Serra
