Mandarin Oriental, the Hong Kong hotel group with a fan as its emblem, has been quietly building a collection of private homes it vets, services and rents out as if they were rooms in one of its hotels. This autumn it added another dozen, which takes the Exceptional Homes collection to 44 villas, castles, farmhouses and, yes, one 15th-century monastery, spread across 18 destinations.
The idea is simple enough to explain at dinner. Each home is privately owned. Mandarin Oriental chooses it for location and design, and then brings what a guest of the group expects: a dedicated concierge to plan the days, a private chef to cook, daily housekeeping, and the kind of discreet attention that does not need to be requested twice.
Where the new ones are
The biggest movement is in Greece, where four homes arrive across Mykonos, Corfu and Lefkada, and another in Porto Heli. Casa Gaia, above Fokos beach on Mykonos, is by the architect Loukas Bobotis and has nine bedrooms, a 27-metre infinity pool and a path to a quiet beach, sleeping up to 18 from €69,062 a week. SERENAOS on Lefkada sits in an olive grove with its own bay and a boat fleet included, from €49,700. On Corfu, VAYRA is carved into an 8,000 square metre hillside and starts at €24,360, while Villa Alice is gentler on the wallet from €17,059.
Italy supplies the most atmosphere. In Florence, Villa Petrucci stands a few steps from the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi after a five-year restoration led by Massimo Adario, from €92,233. Just outside, Dimora Ghirlandaio spreads across five historic buildings on a Renaissance estate once owned by the family of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. It sleeps 37 and starts at €105,800. In Chianti there is Il Cellese, and in Sardinia two beachfront houses, including Villa Ada with 7,000 square metres of gardens, from €168,189. In Puglia, two restored trulli, those conical-roofed stone houses, begin at €14,300 and €17,600.
And then there is Lopud, in Croatia’s Elaphiti Islands off Dubrovnik. It is a car-free island with only about 300 residents, and the estate is a restored 15th-century Franciscan monastery, LOPUD 1483, from €105,000 a week. Elsewhere in the portfolio you can find a 12th-century fortress in Umbria, a château in Cannes and estates in the Cotswolds, Marbella, Ibiza, Mallorca, Thailand and Bali.
A little arithmetic
Those weekly prices sound dizzying until you divide. Most of these houses are meant for groups. Trullo dei Pumi, at €14,300 for up to ten guests, works out at about €200 per person per night. Casa Gaia, for 18, is around €550. Villa Ada, for 15, is closer to €1,600. Treat those as rough figures: they are “from” prices at maximum occupancy, and actual costs will vary with season and numbers. But the sums explain who this is really for: families, friends and multi-generational parties who want a house and a staff, not a lobby.
Who else is doing it
Mandarin Oriental is far from alone, and not the biggest. Four Seasons runs a much larger programme, Villa & Residence Rentals, which as of early 2025 included more than 900 homes in 32 destinations. Against that, 44 homes in 18 places is a boutique shelf. Philip Leighton, who heads the collection, talks about purposeful growth and preserving intimacy and discretion, which is a polite way of saying the group would rather be small and recognisable than large and generic. Whether that is a strength or simply a stage on the way to something bigger is open.
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Discover the world’s most prestigious gatherings & exhibitionsThe model itself is worth noticing. The owners keep their houses; the brand supplies standards and service. It is the same asset-light logic we saw in the Ritz-Carlton’s plan for Brooklyn Heights, where the name is licensed to a developer’s building. A hotel group gets inventory without building anything, and an owner gets a professional operator and a famous name on a very expensive asset. That is attractive in a market where top-end homes continue to sell, as recent luxury figures suggest, and a house with a story (a castle, a monastery, a painter’s estate) becomes both a home and a revenue line.
The private chef is also a quiet sign of the times. Earlier this autumn we looked at how hard it has become to get a table at the world’s best restaurants. A villa with a chef in the kitchen solves that problem very neatly: the reservation is yours, the menu is yours, nobody else is at the next table.
A few honest reservations
The word “exceptional” is the group’s own, and there is no independent review on offer, so it pays to ask the right questions: what is included, what the rules are, how far the nearest village is. The portfolio is also heavily European. Of 44 homes, only three are in Asia, which is odd for a brand from Hong Kong.
None of this takes away from the appeal. If you have ever wanted the privacy of a house and the service of a hotel, this collection is a thoughtfully chosen way to get both. You can browse it at mandarinoriental.com/exceptional-homes. Bring friends, or a sizeable family. And ask whether the monastery comes with a bell.
