SOURCE- THE TELEGRAPH- by Zoe Dare Hall- When Hurricane Irma swept across the Caribbean island of Barbuda in 2017, it left a scene of destruction. Almost every building was devastated, and all 1,600 residents were forced to evacuate to neighbouring Antigua for up to a year. Yet a box of tissues sitting on the kitchen table in Robert De Niro’s beachfront home survived unscathed.
The 82-year-old actor – Bob, as he asks to be called – gives a familiar raised eyebrow and low-key chuckle at the bizarre incongruity of it all. “Barbuda was levelled, pretty much. In my house, the ocean had pushed the furniture into the living room and out the back window into the back yard. And then, oddly enough, there was a little table with a box of tissues that had not been touched. You see that with these disasters, where things are spared for some weird reason,” recalls a relaxed De Niro, casually dressed in a white T-shirt (the rest is obscured by his laptop), as he speaks on Zoom early one Saturday morning from his home in upstate New York.
For a man worth an estimated $500m (£367m) – amassed from both a six-decade film career (that shows no sign of slowing down) and a juggernaut of a hotel, hospitality and property empire that includes co-ownership of the $1bn Nobu brand – his Barbudan home is relatively modest. “It’s very simple, just a one-level beach house with a couple of guest rooms connected to it,” he says of his cottage, the white walls of which match the sugar-fine sand that surrounds it, its turquoise-framed verandas echoing the electric blue of the ocean just out front.
There is little else in sight for miles on this flat and sparsely populated island peppered with mangroves and lagoons. But this secluded spot on Princess Diana Beach – so named as the princess frequently sought sanctuary at the K Club resort that once stood on the site – has captivated De Niro ever since he stumbled across it 30 years ago.
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“I came on a boat from Antigua for lunch one day and I didn’t even know what the island was, but I never forgot the beach. It was just beautiful. I thought that if I ever did a resort, this could be the place,” he says.
Then, in 2014, his dream came true: the K Club site became available. He and his business partner, the Australian billionaire James Packer, took over the lease for the 400-acre site, and De Niro renovated a cottage that had belonged to the club’s architect for his own use when visiting the island.
After Irma struck, he patched it up again, “in exactly the same way that it was”, he says. Soon, though, he will finish the demolition job that the category-five hurricane didn’t quite complete, as he is bulldozing the cottage to build himself a new home in the same spot.
It will still be simple, he insists, just “with a few extra bedrooms, a pool and a tennis court” – a sport he plays well enough, he says, “to still want to play”.
“I’ll spend as much time there as my schedule allows, always with members of my family, who love it there too,” he adds, having recently returned from a holiday there with his 46-year-old partner, Tiffany Chen, a martial arts instructor and actor, and their two-year-old daughter, Gia – the youngest of De Niro’s seven children from four different relationships.
But his new home will no longer sit in such blissful isolation, as it will soon form part of The Beach Club Barbuda, the $250m resort that De Niro is building with Packer and the British entrepreneur Daniel Shamoon, whom he met seven years ago when opening the Nobu restaurant at one of Shamoon’s hotels, the star-studded Puente Romano in Marbella, Spain.
Set along two miles of beautiful, largely untouched seafront, The Beach Club will include Nobu Beach Inn, a hotel with accommodation set in 17 villas of up to 6,000 sq ft, due for completion in early 2026. Each villa will have its own private beach garden featuring outdoor showers and ice baths and amenities ranging from watersports to an omakase sushi bar.
Lining the beachfront are 25 private villas serviced by Nobu Beach Inn. Priced from $12m (£8.8m), they come fully furnished and are customisable with home cinemas, wine cellars or whatever the buyer desires. “This is hassle-free Caribbean living. When you arrive, your clothes will be hanging up, your lychee martini poured,” says Shamoon, 50, who bears a passing resemblance to James Blunt, all boyish looks and expensive-education voice. In between wakeboarding and doing business deals from his speedboat, he has joined the Zoom call from the Hermitage Bay resort he owns in Antigua.
There are also 30 Beach Club plots for sale, of up to 5½ acres each, priced from $7m. And already up and running since 2020 is the Nobu Barbuda restaurant – a relaxed, toes-in-the-sand affair where the dress code, unofficially, is bikini – serving the global brand’s staples such as black cod miso (De Niro’s favourite) to the jet set who have stumbled across this desert island. “One of my most favourite moments is my daily walk along the beach from my house to Nobu and back,” says the actor.
While The Beach Club Barbuda is still a construction site, some diners come from the island’s sole other luxury resort, Discovery Land’s Barbuda Ocean Club, farther along the beach. Others drop in for lunch by helicopter from Antigua, a 10-minute hop away. But there’s a third way for those who want the more immersive approach, and that’s to arrive by speedboat – which, in the absence of a jetty, requires slipping neck-deep into the bath-warm sea and emerging, Ursula Andress-like, from the waves.
“That’s how we want everyone to arrive, jumping off the boat into the water,” De Niro says, smiling, “though it can be a little rough going over. I can do it, but whoever is with me, it’s tough to put them through it too.”
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Nice lobbying by you and your successful team Bob in regards to Nobu Beach Inn.
Please let us know your secret on how you managed to get through to our stubborn and belligerent Prime Minister so quickly in this luxurious development?
A remarkable achievement Bob 👍🏾
Was our Prime Minister SMITTEN by being associated with a global superstar like yourself?
Bob, like yourself Antiguans have been “lobbying” for Gaston Browne for better housing, better roads, a manufacturing sector to create better and well paid jobs, and also a life-saving water supply system.
TFLL US YOUR SECRET BOB?