Robert De Niro: My new Caribbean resort (with $12m villas).
Robert De Niro and his business partner Daniel Shamoon at the Nobu Beach Inn, Barbuda
We speak to the Oscar-winning actor about the Holiday Paradise he’s creating in Barbuda, which promises luxury for those who can afford the $7m starting price tag.
This story takes in a Hollywood icon, one of the Caribbean's most exceptional beaches linked to Diana, Princess of Wales, and big-budget homes on a residential resort that was ten years in the making.
For a decade, the Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro, 82, has owned land in Barbuda, Antigua's little-known sister island, with a clear image of the resort he would create: low-key luxury in a natural setting. While De Niro was busy with his acting career, his side hustle as a hotelier (the Greenwich in New York) and his part· ownership of the celeb-heavy restaurant group Nobu, Barbuda faced its own challenges. Hurricane Irma rattled through in 2017, veering off its projected course at the last minute to avoid Antigua but causing death and almost total destruction on low-level Barbuda. The arrival of Covid added further delays to De Niro's plans.
But now a new dawn has come for the island and De Niro's resort, Nobu Beach Inn, opens next year. That's why the A -lister, barefoot and delightfully unstarry, is standing on 2.5 miles of blisteringly beautiful beachfront, talking to me about his love for the 391-acre site.
Plots at Nobu Beach Inn, opening in 2026, start from $7 million, with turnkey residences from $12 million
"I first sailed past this beach 30 years ago, coming from the Grenadines, and over the years stayed at the K Club and never forgot it," De Niro says. "You have to see it to fully understand its beauty. It's spectacular, with waves and the open ocean on a quiet island that's easily accessible from Europe and east coast USA. When the property became available in 2015, [the Australian billionaire] James Packer and I had the vision to create something that fits in with Barbuda; understated and authentic."
The beach on Barbuda's southern coast is indeed exceptional, crushed shells giving the sand a rose-coloured glow-up against the Caribbean Sea. Previously known as Coco Point Beach, it was renamed after its most famous regular visitor, Princess Diana, who holidayed at the K Club Hotel in the 1990s with Princes William and Harry. The K Club closed in 2004 and, with only 3,100 annual visitors to Barbuda (compared with about 900,000 to Antigua), the beach retained its castaway vibe, used only by the 1,600 local population and determined visitors arriving by private yacht, ferry or light aircraft.
Now change is afoot as not one but two upmarket resorts - both with stratospheric price tags - take shape along the beach. It began in 2020 with the opening of Nobu Barbuda, an offshoot of the celebrity hotspotJapanese restaurant, on the site of the K Club. It forms the central point of De Niro's Nobu Beach Inn, where a 17-key all-villa hotel is due to open next year. Pre-sales start this autumn for 55 properties, with plots from $7 million (£5 million) and residences from $12 million.
The airy, open-plan residences are designed by the London-based interior studio Ward & Co.
The second new project, far larger in scale, is Barbuda Ocean Club, a development by the exclusive US golf resort developer Discovery Land Co (DLC), which plans at least 300 homes, most two or three storeys, and a golf course across two separate Barbuda sites. DLC is tight-lipped on detailed plans, confirming only that the first phase of homes is nearly sold out and that prices start from "over $10 million". A third Barbuda project, with branded residences by the five-star hotelier Rosewood Hotel Group, has now been withdrawn.
The price tags mean that plenty of owners for both schemes are expected to arrive in private jets, and to service them Barbuda has the Caribbean's newest airport. Despite a lengthy legal campaign against it, led by two Barbudians, that eventually escalated to the UK's Privy Council, the $14 million airport opened in October 2024 and was declared a "gamechanger" by the island's head of tourism.
"The team behind Nobu Beach Inn are rebuilding something that was already there and taking great environmental care," says Andrew Robson, the project's head of sales. "The mangroves damaged in Hurricane Irma are being carefully replanted and no structure will be over 20ft tall or within 136ft of the beach. It has a subtlety and simplicity that's reminiscent of the Caribbean of old, just with the added benefits of a fresh new design and culinary excellence, including Nobu and other restaurants.”
“You have to see it to fully understand its unique beauty.” De Niro says
The London-based interior studio Ward & Co is designing the residences, bringing an airy, open-plan style that its founder Sarah Ward says will reflect the "exclusivity and natural beachfront beauty of Barbuda". De Niro has been hands-on at every stage, scrutinising architectural drawings, discussing fabrics and inspecting the landscape plans, a key part of the project.
"Getting a project like this over the line is hard," the actor says, with what seems like blockbuster levels of understatement. "But I made a commitment and believe in what we are doing. Good partners help."
De Niro, Packer and the third partner, Daniel Shamoon - co-owner of award-winning hotels including Marbella Club, Nobu Marrakech and Puente Romano Beach Resort - have the deep pockets and five-star hospitality experience to pull off something special. All three are building their own homes there: until then, De Niro stays in Barbuda with his family at the one remaining K Club villa.
The properties have direct access to the beach
"Three fundamental things make Nobu Beach Inn special. The unique location, the ease of getting there through the new airport and our focus on accentuating the natural beauty, building only single-level homes," Shamoon says. "We are closer to the day when the three of us will sit on the beach enjoying a martini together as our children run along the beach."
De Niro, whose youngest child is two, nods in agreement. "The key to getting this over the line was just to keep going," he says.
living on Antigua
Since swapping the UK for life in Antigua in 2011, Kamal and Portia Moursy, 45 and 43, have seen some significant changes. "The private jet terminal has really grown, English Harbour has become more high-end and the international school where I work has become even more diverse," says Portia, who is the head of Island Academy School. "We have a child from almost every continent and there are 15 languages spoken in all."
Kamal and Portia Moursy, with their daughter Zahra, moved from the UK to Antigua
The couple met at Leeds University and the impetus to move came when Kamal, a dentist, was offered a job in Antigua. They live in Jolly Harbour on the west coast with their daughter, Zahra, 13 (pictured below).
With new direct flights coming from Toronto, New York and Miami, as well as the regular weekly UK flights, there was a sense that Antigua had a "bumper season" this summer, Portia says. "Yet despite all the changes, the pace of life remains steady and slow, where people get up with the sun and keep active," she says.