Albero Capovolto, and some thoughts on Hospitality

An unexpected part of my work is that people now ask me for travel advice. This year someone actually asked me to plan an entire itinerary for them. This is both flattering and unnerving, as I am not a travel agent, I do not stay in many hotels in Sardinia for obvious reasons (I live here. I like my bed. I have numerous animals and plants to feed, water and walk - I love the idea of walking my plants) and I eat out fairly irregularly, especially now that I have a tiny terrorist perched permanently on my hip who believes food is more fun as an artistic medium rather than something you actually swallow. The thing is, based on my limited experience of them, I don't really like many hotels or restaurants. Now hang on. I do really like some of them, love them even, but so many of them are impersonal or overly formal or slightly sad or seedy or trying too hard. Now, as I have limited space and this is a subject I feel very strongly about, let's stick to just one of these two purveyors of hospitality: hotels.

definitely neither sad nor seedy

Of course when I use words like sad and seedy I'm talking about the sort of hotels where you book in for a night on your way somewhere mostly because they are practical and close to the airport, and you have tiny paper coasters that stick to your cup and mini packets of biscuits and individual teabags which taste of box and tiny plastic pots of milk that explode all over you when you open them. The bathroom boasts the world's most unflattering mirrors so you can see bits of your body you had forgotten (through years of dedicated and deliberate blindness) ever existed, and the light over the main mirror means you can see into the dark and tortured soul of each individual pore on your nose. The sort of hotel where you can't open the window because all you would see anyway is a concrete parking lot, and all you would breath are the fumes from the massive extraction tubes which blow out steam below. These sort I know well because every time we went anywhere on a plane my Dad would book us into one for the night.

Now a part of me, the illogical, nostalgic part, also loves these hotels the same way I love a Boot's sandwich (I will never forget the first time Luca walked into a Boots in the UK and bellowed incredulously; "you sell PANINI IN THE PHARMACY???? What is this country??' It is pretty odd if you think about it) because I have grown up with them, with the bad breakfasts in their long steel tureens, with the withered sausages and the clumpy scrambled eggs and the sad sagging tomatoes. Ah yes, I know these hotels well. For my father they were a luxury, and he would eat 4 rounds of breakfast on principle; "Kid's, have another plate, it's all included!" he would say, spearing another shrivelled sausage with relish. But then, of course, the rational part of me hates the lack of fresh air, the grey concrete view, the unforgivable breakfasts, the impersonality of every room, and the endless, endless corridors with ugly carpets.

no carpet in sight.

So, whilst my life has not been exactly full of nice hotels, the few really special ones that I have been to are wedged firmly in my memory. The happiest one from my childhood was a Bed and Breakfast in Canada during Halloween, which was run by an elderly couple, and where we ate zucchini muffins baked by the wife for breakfast with bacon and maple syrup and she had a real bucket of candy in the sitting room for the trick-or-treaters. A bucket! of Candy! In my house we had a 'sweetie drawer' which was just half a kitchen drawer with some stale sweets in it, the other half occupied by old elastic bands and tape. My most favourite stays have almost always been in places like this, more B and B than hotel as such, when the family still live there and double up as your hosts (no uniforms, no cleaning trolley, no tiny biscuits, no weird formality). There was another memorable one in Hay on Wye, where we went expressly for the bookshops and were not disappointed - I bought my beloved edition of The Gashlycrum Tinies here and it is still one of my prize possessions - and we stayed with a lovely couple in their old farmhouse and she fed us homemade fruitcake and tea on our arrival. Another lost in the mist above a Loch somewhere when I kept my brother company for a day on his Landsend to John O' Groats walk and then darkness fell and we were sure we would die alone there in the bracken and be eaten by stags, until we spied in the distance a lit window and made it to a surreal, almost biblical Bed and Breakfast, where (another) elderly couple fed us venison stew and plum crumble with Bird's custard. We sat and warmed our blistered feet in front of a roaring fire and I felt like sometimes real life really is better than anything anyone ever made up (including the Bible). Then, of course, there all the lovely, non-sad or seedy Bed and Breakfast/small hotels that I have found here in Sardinia (and a couple beyond too).

Now, though I am not a travel agent or even a travel writer, I do feel happy recommending these places to people because I have actually been to them, or I have worked with or for them, or I know their owners and know they are real people who are doing these things because they love to and because they care. A few of these places may object to being called Hotels, which sounds instantly big and foreboding, or Bed and Breakfasts, which can sound chintzy and naff, so I notice often people add the word 'boutique' or 'luxury' beforehand. Now I'm not here to quibble about nomenclature, and certainly Bed and Breakfast does have a rather perfunctory and particularly uninviting ring to it (even more so when shortened to the awful 'B and B'), but let's not split hairs about it. The point is that what makes these places special is neither anything to do with 'luxury' or 'boutique', it's to do with the hospitality they provide.

Hospitality; now there is another word I take real umbrage with. Anything that sounds like a hospital - the very worst of all places - is always going to be off-putting. The root of both words comes from the Latin hospes, which means guest or stranger. Hospitality means looking after someone, a guest or stranger, and, in its purest sense, making said stranger feel at home. This, when applied to the Hospitality industry, is ironic, because hotels and restaurants are exactly not that; instead they are the literal antithesis of home. However, I firmly believe that good hospitality, true hospitality, should be about making someone feel that they are at home, only in a home where they do not have to wash up or tidy or remember the billion boring domestic chores that their own homes require, and where everything is just a little bit more beautiful but not intimidatingly so, and - most crucially - where the bedposts aren't smeared with banana.

Which brings me to Albero Capovolto. I discovered this place by chance as I was invited to an event there, but I am so glad I got to experience it firsthand because now, when people ask me where they should stay in the North of Sardinia I can finally tell them. Albero Capovolto is the perfect example of a perfect hotel. I won't add the 'boutique' or the 'luxury', I'll just say if I was in the business of seeking out either I would find them both, and much, much more at Albero Capovolto.

The personal touches here are what really makes it: there are all the usual boxes ticked (beautiful and inviting swimming pool, shady spots for aperitivo, rambling bouganvillea, immaculate and individually styled bathrooms etc) but what really made it for me were those little, perhaps unremarkable elements which belied an incredible attention to detail and made you feel just how much the people who ran this place really cared.

The people who run this place are really just a person; Alessandro, who grew up as the fifth son in a large Bolognese family who built this house as their holiday home many years back when almost all Northern Italians bought little stone shepherd's houses in Sardinia for a song and turned them into charming holiday homes by the sea. Alessandro grew up spending his summers here, and his room, where I stayed, boasts a photo of him as a toddler on the wall, looking impossibly sweet, toothy and bronzed in the azure Sardinian sea water. The curtain - which I noticed instantly - was a beautiful tapestry/collage of old lace and print, embroidered with his initials (by his mother, he told me). The room was simple but beautiful, with beach-wood bench and embroidered curtain, the bed luxuriously soft, the bedlinen silky, and the bedspread a perfect example of immaculate cream Sardinian embroidery.

plumpest of sofas

An inveterate early riser, I wandered upstairs to find Alessandro (an even earlier riser, who is usually up and about by 5) already assiduously plumping cushions, straightening the collection of classic editions on the coffee table, and pulling out chilled water from the fridge in signature designed bottles on beautiful, deliberately imperfect, recycled glass coasters. Now if this all sounds sickening, I can assure you it wasn't; it was totally natural, charming and - the word that really comes to mind - touching. Alessandro was there plumping his cushions for us from 5am, and it made me feel cared for in a way that no pack of cookies and mini milk pouch will ever do. He took our coffee orders, brought me books to read, refilled my water, laid out a tiny vintage napkin (again embroidered by his mother) for me, told me about his plants (he and his husband did the garden themselves) and then disappeared to plump ever more cushions. He spent the rest of the day gliding in and out greeting guests and plumping and polishing and I never once saw him sit down, eat or drink.

Whilst he has a chef for evening dinners, and a lovely lady who comes in to do the breakfast (individual jars of homemade yoghurt and an array of achingly perfect cakes amongst other things I was too busy eating cake to notice) Alessandro is at the helm of everything. When you call the hotel, it is he that answers, he that organises your arrival, he that looks after you during your stay. Though officially a 7 bedroom hotel, the house still feels exactly like this: a house, with your host, the charming Alessandro attending to your every need. By the kitchen is another family portrait: all 5 boys and their mum in the turquoise Sardinian sea. There is a proper sitting room, two large communal tables on the veranda, you wind your way up to the house where you are greeted by Alessandro on a beautiful shady terrace, populated with impossibly plump cream sofas. There is no 'desk', no 'reception' no 'till' - nothing so uncouth. Alessandro trained as an interior designer and then ran his own interiors shop for many years in Milan, and everywhere is evidence that this is a man who understands both how to make people feel comfortable and how to create beautiful spaces. This is a true host, and this is true hospitality. So, at last, if you're looking for somewhere to stay in the North, I couldn't recommend Albero Capovolto anymore.

lusting after my own artichoke and cauliflower pot

(N.B. Please note this is the sort of hotel where the kids stay at home. All those cream sofas.)