Suite Treats

You can check out anytime you like, but a wave of clothing collaborations, homewares, and other goods ensures you never really leave your favourite luxury hotels.

- Mark Ellwood

Hotelier Marie-Louise Sciò is glad she didn't know what she didn't know when she joined the family business, which operates a trio of luxury stays in Italy. “I didn’t go to hospitality school,” says the entrepreneur, whose best-known property is Porto Ercole’s Hotel Il Pellicano. “It was a very rigid world, with a lot of men running it.” Her fresh, out-of-the-box thinking has helped her forge a reputation as an innovator—not least for her approach to the hotel’s boutique, which was once just “a little shop with crappy caps and all that.”

To bring it up to snuff, she began partnering with the who’s who of well-known brands and makers, such as fine-jewellery designer Francesca Amfitheatrof and even Birkenstock. “That was the groundbreaking one, and it was really huge in terms of sales and global reach,” she says. “And it came out of a personal necessity, as I was wearing them all the time I was in the hotel.”

That sold-out collaboration—and the store itself—isn’t just a loss-leading gimmick. “It does make money for us,” Sciò adds. Now, it has expanded beyond just accommodations: It owns and operates a motor yacht, ideal for trips to the nearby Tuscan islands, and has even gotten into online retail via Issimo, where you can buy wares emblazoned with the property’s logo.