“You have to give the place a personality,” Antonio Sersale tells me over Zoom, sun dappling through a window.
Antonio, son of Franco, is the current patriarch of Le Sirenuse. Or maybe he’s better described as a chief executive officer: Under his stewardship, the hotel has transformed from being, well, a hotel, and into a lifestyle brand. His wife, Carla, once charged by Paolo to run the Sirenuse boutique, scaled it into a fashion and homewares company called Emporio Sirenuse. She’s nonchalant about how she became a designer: “I ran that store for about 20 years, and I bought different brands, different things.… Then, one day, I went to Milan, and my niece, who was living in Bombay, was starting to experiment with textiles and she did a trunk show. And I saw her style, and I was completely blown away. So I decided to go to Bombay for two months and start a collection with her.” Carla says. That “experiment” led to a brand stocked at mega retailers like Net-a-porter and Le Bon Marché. Look around any moneyed European holiday destination, and you’ll see a chic woman wearing one of their colorful printed maxi dresses.
Their son Francesco manages the brand of Le Sirenuse and Emporio Sirenuse, while their other son, Aldo, oversees operations. It’s an impressive feat, especially when you consider that many other famous European hotels are run by management companies with multiple titles in their portfolio—Hotel du Cap by Oetker, Claridge’s by Maybourne, Hôtel Plaza Athénée by Dorchester. “In a country filled with beautiful hotels owned by chains and big groups, Le Sirenuse feels small and intimate, like you’ve stepped into the Sersales’ home,” Masarin says.
That’s the point. While the Sersales have a separate villa in Positano, they still view Le Sirenuse as their main residence: “It’s our life. We come here, we have lunch, we have dinner. We invite friends. We have breakfast in the hotel. So we all basically live the hotel as though it was our house,” he says.
