By Blanche Marcel

Copyright vanityfair

De Niro has developed an impressive real estate career along with his storied film career. The two-time Oscar winner is also a co-owner of the Nobu brand, which includes about 60 Nobu restaurants and 19 hotels and is worth approximately $1 billion. With his new venture, dubbed The Beach Club Barbuda, De Niro seeks to add another resort to his portfolio.
The secluded spot on Princess Diana Beach has captivated De Niro ever since he first visited the island, located approximately 30 miles north of Antigua. “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,” De Niro told The Telegraph.
De Niro is not building this resort alone. He’s working with his Australian billionaire business partner, James Packer, as well as British entrepreneur Daniel Shamoon, whom he met seven years ago when opening a Nobu restaurant at Shamoon’s Puente Romano hotel in Marbella, Spain.
Princess Diana was fond of the Caribbean and came to Barbuda on several occasions. In 1997, shortly before her death, Diana was photographed at the K Club, stretched out on a deckchair, all smiles, in a blue-and-green bathing suit.
The K Club, the property where Diana used to recuperate on Barbuda, became available in 2014 after lying dormant and unused for 10 years. Packer and De Niro took over the lease for the 400-acre site, and De Niro renovated for himself a cottage that had belonged to the club’s architect. The Raging Bull star has described his house on the island as “modest.” “It’s very simple, just a one-level beach house with a couple of guest rooms connected to it,” he said.
De Niro almost lost his Barbuda home when Hurricane Irma swept across the Caribbean island in 2017. Almost every building on Barbuda was destroyed, and the tiny island’s 1,600 residents were all forced to evacuate to neighboring Antigua for up to a year. “Barbuda was leveled, pretty much. In my house, the ocean had pushed the furniture into the living room and out the back window into the backyard,” De Niro said. “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.”
Post-disaster, De Niro patched up his home to make it “exactly the same way that it was,” but, as part of the construction on The Beach Club Barbuda, he’s preparing to demolish it and rebuild it again, adding “a few extra bedrooms, a pool, and a tennis court.” Located along two miles of scenic seafront property, De Niro’s resort will include Nobu Beach Inn, a hotel with 17 villas as large as 6,000 square feet. Each villa will reportedly have a private beach garden with outdoor showers, ice baths, and even an omakase sushi bar. There will also be 25 beachfront villas that will come fully furnished and be customizable with home cinemas and wine cellars, starting at $12 million. The property is due for completion in early 2026.
The 82-year-old De Niro shares a two-year-old daughter, Gia, with his 46-year-old partner, Tiffany Chen. Gia is the youngest of De Niro’s seven children from four different relationships, a group that also includes model and actor Airyn, who recently came out as a trans woman. As for Barbuda, De Niro told The Telegraph that he plans to spend “as much time there as my schedule allows, always with members of my family, who love it there too.”
“It’s very calm. It’s very pleasant,” De Niro said of Barbuda. “There aren’t many people around. The donkeys come to me, that’s all.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair France.