Cheval Blanc Pitrizza: Costa Smeralda Relaunch May 2027

Hotel Pitrizza at Porto Cervo will relaunch as Cheval Blanc Pitrizza, Costa Smeralda in May 2027. The date comes from Cheval Blanc itself, through its Regional Director of Sales Europe, Lea Garret, in an interview published by Latte Luxury News on 13 March 2026, and it closes a question the Costa Smeralda has been asking since February 2023: when does LVMH’s hotel brand actually put its name on the door. The answer is next spring, after a transformation that has already touched about 80 percent of the rooms.

What Cheval Blanc has said, in its own words

Garret was speaking at Traveller Made’s Essence of Phuket show when she set out the group’s timetable. Most of the rooms are done. What remains is a redesigned spa and a new fine-dining restaurant, and the brand will not open under its own name until both are finished. She also said the hotel is “more expensive right now than before” even though it is not yet branded, which tells you how the market has read the renovation. The line that explains the whole project is the one about the name.

“We never put our name on it until it’s ready to go.”

That patience is a policy, not a delay. Garret described Cheval Blanc’s growth as “very slow expansion, one every four or five years at most”, and added that it will stay that way. The brand opened Paris on 7 September 2021 and the Seychelles on 1 December 2024, and Pitrizza follows in 2027. The group’s Dubai project, she said, is still four or five years away.

The agreement of February 2023

The story begins with a release of 14 February 2023. Smeralda Holding, the company that has owned the Costa Smeralda’s founding hotels since the Qatar Investment Authority bought it in 2012, signed with LVMH for two of them. Romazzino went to Belmond and reopened as Romazzino, A Belmond Hotel in June 2024. Pitrizza went to Cheval Blanc, with a sentence that has governed everything since: the hotel “will continue to operate under its current name until 2026, when it will be rebranded as Cheval Blanc Pitrizza, Costa Smeralda, following the completion of the renovation works”. The legal notice on hotelpitrizza.com already names LVMH Hotel Management as publisher and Sardegna Resorts S.r.l. as owner. The Luxury Collection affiliation that Pitrizza carried for years no longer appears on the hotel’s own site, although Marriott still keeps a page for it.

What Pitrizza is today

The hotel that Luigi Vietti designed in 1963 on the bay of Liscia di Vacca is small by Costa Smeralda standards. It has 49 rooms and suites and 16 villas in six categories. Sixty-five keys in all. They are spread through granite and greenery so that most of the buildings disappear from the water. There is one restaurant, The Grill, a bar, Bar Pitrizza, a spa and fitness centre open daily from 10:00 to 20:00, and a beach the hotel describes as secluded. Vietti was one of the architects the Aga Khan’s consortium chose for the first Costa Smeralda in the early 1960s, and Pitrizza is the clearest survivor of that first idea: low, stone-built, its roofs planted over, deliberately hard to see. Cheval Blanc has not named a designer for the transformation and has not said whether the room count will change.

The seventh Maison and the first in Italy

Cheval Blanc is the hotel arm of LVMH. It has grown at the pace Garret describes. Courchevel opened first, in 2006. Then came the Maldives, Saint-Barth, Saint-Tropez, Paris in 2021 and the Seychelles at the end of 2024: six Maisons in twenty years, listed on chevalblanc.com. Pitrizza will be the seventh and the first in Italy. That last point is the one the Costa Smeralda will trade on. The group already has Bulgari hotels in Milan and Rome, but Cheval Blanc is a different proposition, built around a single house in a single place, and Sardinia will be the first Italian address to carry it.

The neighbours in 2027

The relaunch lands in a crowded season. A short drive south, Hotel Cala di Volpe remains with Marriott’s Luxury Collection. Romazzino has been a Belmond hotel since 2024. Rocco Forte’s Porto Cervo hotel, first announced for 2024, now targets 2027, as we reported in our update on the project. Mandarin Oriental announced a Porto Cervo hotel in August 2023 for mid-2026; the property does not yet appear among the hotels on the group’s own site, and we set out what is known in our piece on the project. If all of them open, the summer of 2027 will put four international luxury brands within a quarter of an hour of each other on a coast that five years ago flew the Luxury Collection flag alone.

What to expect from the price

Cheval Blanc does not publish rates for a hotel that has not opened, and the current Pitrizza rates are for a hotel in transition. Garret’s remark that the hotel is already more expensive than before is the only public signal. It is a clear one. The comparison that matters is the Cheval Blanc Saint-Tropez, the group’s other Mediterranean house, where a summer night runs well past a thousand euros, and the Belmond Romazzino next door, which set the local benchmark when it reopened in 2024. Expect Pitrizza to be priced between those two markers, and expect the sixteen villas to be sold as the Costa Smeralda’s most private rooms, because that is what Vietti built them to be.

The Luxury.it perspective

The Costa Smeralda has spent sixty years selling its hotels under their own names. The Aga Khan’s consortium built them, Starwood and then Marriott flagged them, and the guests came for the coast and for the houses themselves. The 2023 agreement changed that, and Pitrizza is where the change is most visible: a hotel of 65 keys, the smallest of the founding four, handed to one of the slowest-growing luxury hotel brands in the world and rebuilt over three summers before the name goes up. That is the opposite of how most resorts are relaunched, and it is the reason to take the May 2027 date seriously. The risk is not in the hotel. It is in the crowd around it, with Belmond already open, Rocco Forte and Mandarin Oriental on the calendar and Cala di Volpe still the address most of the world knows. Pitrizza will be the smallest and the quietest of them, which on this coast has always been the point.