A castle that was never a castle: Gino Coppedè designed it around 1913 for Attilio Odero, a senator and shipbuilding entrepreneur, giving it a tower, loggias, projecting balconies and mullioned windows as if it had always stood on the headland. Villa Beatrice, still known to many in Portofino as Castello Odero, passed after the Second World War to Enrico Piaggio, son of Elena Odero, and then to the Tonolli and Costa-Ardissone families. In 2021 it was bought by Belmond, the international hotel group taken over in 2018 by the Arnault family's LVMH.
What to see
The building rises over four levels and the tower stands beside it, added to the main volume rather than merged with it: this is the most recognisable move of Coppedè, an architect who worked by quotation and here drew on the Neo-Gothic repertoire. The surfaces matter as much as the silhouette: stone, decorated plaster with inserts of coloured tiles, white cement. From a distance the effect is medieval; look at the details and it is all early twentieth century.
The setting does the rest. The villa stands sheer above the sea on the Punta Cajega promontory, with a large garden that fades into the woodland of the Portofino Regional Natural Park, established in 1935. The green behind the house is not private landscaping but protected land, which is why almost nothing else has grown up around it.
Visiting
There is no visit: the villa is private property and can only be seen from outside. The natural viewpoint is the water, from the boats arriving in Portofino and from any craft passing by, because that is where the whole front reads at once, tower included. From land you catch it in fragments from the park paths that drop towards the village, between pines and holm oaks, and almost never whole.
Our editors' tip
Make a comparison. There is another villa on the headland playing at being a castle, Altachiara. Look at the two of them in sequence from the sea, ideally in late afternoon when the low light picks up the coloured tiles, and within two minutes you will understand what the Genoese shipowners of the early twentieth century were after: not a seaside house, but a stage set built to be seen from the water.