HBA at One&Only Portonovi: quiet grandeur on the shores of Boka Bay

DESIGN TRAVEL · MONTENEGRO

Reading time: 9 min

At the seaward entrance to Montenegro’s Boka Bay, HBA has designed a resort that borrows the calm of monastic architecture and the warmth of the Adriatic in equal measure. The studio’s interiors move from a vaulted arrival hall to a gold mosaic hammam, and the whole thing is held together by material rather than decoration. It is one of the most quietly assured pieces of resort design in Europe.

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There is a moment on the drive along the coast from Tivat when the water opens out and the mountains behind it turn from green to grey, and you understand why people have been building carefully in this bay for six hundred years. One&Only Portonovi sits right at that opening, at Kumbor in the municipality of Herceg Novi, on the outer arm of Boka Bay.

The resort opened on 1 May 2021 as the first One&Only in Europe. It holds 113 rooms, suites and villas, a superyacht marina, and a 4,000 square metre Chenot Espace. Those are the numbers, and they are the least interesting thing about it.

What makes it worth a long look is the interior architecture, which is the work of HBA, led from HBA Singapore with HBA London, with Paula O’Callaghan as the partner in charge of both the hotel and the spa. HBA also brought in its own specialist studios: Social F+B for the restaurants and bars, Light Directions for the lighting, and HBA Art for the art programme. The building itself is by Denniston, with Jean-Michel Gathy as principal designer.

Resorts on this scale are usually described through their amenities. Portonovi rewards a slower reading, because HBA built it around a single idea and then held that idea steady across every room in the place.

HBA began with a monastery, and kept the calm

The studio’s starting point was monastic architecture, translated into a contemporary expression. HBA describes the aim as “quiet grandeur”, arrived at through “voluminous ceilings, layered textures, time-worn materials, and sculptural forms.”

It is a generous idea, and a slightly unfashionable one for a beach resort. Monastic buildings are designed to make people feel settled. They work through proportion, through the way light lands on a wall over the course of a day, and through repetition. HBA has taken all three and warmed them up. Ceilings are tall and the sightlines are long, so the eye is always being offered somewhere further to go. Surfaces are hand finished, so the light catches unevenly. Nothing shouts.

Paula O’Callaghan puts the setting into it directly. “Amidst the quaint stone cottages tumbling down rugged slopes, HBA created a quiet statement of modern luxury and sophistication,” she says, and that phrase, a quiet statement, is the fairest description of the whole project.

The pleasure of it is that the calm never tips into coolness. This is a warm building. It is full of fire, timber, leather and amber glass, and the restraint is what allows those materials to register.

The Palazzo, and the welcome it builds

HBA calls the arrival volume the Palazzo, and it does most of the persuading.

The ceilings are barrel vaulted in a platinum tone and finished with wood marquetry, which is a lovely piece of thinking: the marquetry gives a vault, normally a plain plastered form, a grain and a direction. The walls are aged tumbled stone. The floors are cool grey marble. Embroidered sheers hang at the openings, and there are two oversized hearths.

The lighting, by Light Directions, is doing quiet work here. The vault is washed with tuneable white striplight, so the platinum finish shifts through the day, and the sheers are grazed with linear light so the embroidery reads as texture rather than pattern. HBA describes the whole scheme as choreographed to move with the hours, cooler by daylight, warmer and lower after dark.

Two hearths in a Mediterranean resort might sound like a flourish. In practice they set the temperature of the welcome. You arrive into a room with a fire in it, and the building has told you what kind of place it intends to be before anyone has said a word.

A bay that taught its buildings to be made of stone

HBA’s material palette makes complete sense once you know what the bay is made of.

Boka Bay is a drowned river valley, which is why it branches inland the way it does, and almost all the rock around it is carbonate: greyish white limestone and dolomite, in a karst landscape of caves, springs and disappearing streams. Stone is the material the region has always had in abundance, and it built a masonry culture to match.

That culture is recognised formally. The inner bay was inscribed by UNESCO in 1979 as the Natural and Culturo-Historical Region of Kotor, covering 14,600 hectares, and the citation praises its “renowned schools of masonry and iconography.” Kotor holds four Romanesque churches. Perast, a little further in, is one of the most completely preserved small towns on the Adriatic.

So when HBA specifies tumbled stone, cool grey marble and hand finished plaster, it is not reaching for a generic Mediterranean look. It is working in the local grammar. The resort sits at the entrance to the bay rather than inside the inscribed area, and the interiors carry the inner bay’s masonry sensibility out to the mouth of it.

Where Venice meets Istanbul

Gathy has been unusually precise about the architectural reference frame. The building, he has said, works from “a mixture of Venetian, Turkish and Slav proportions”, combining “Palladian volume and symmetry” with “Turkish architectural respect for arches and hammams”, on the grounds that Montenegro sat on the historic route between Istanbul and Venice.

The Venetian strand is the easiest to see, because the bay is full of it. Venice held this coast for centuries and left palazzi, campanili and a particular way of stepping a stone façade down to the water. Gathy cites the “Baroque palazzos from Kotor and Venetian-built Perast” and buildings that form “an animated whole, with columns, galleries, cornices surmounted by corbels.” The Slav strand is in the volume and the weight of the stone.

The Turkish strand is the one that had to be built rather than referenced, and that is HBA’s territory. Herceg Novi was Ottoman from 1482 until 1687, so the eastern half of Gathy’s sentence is a straightforward description of where the resort stands. HBA took it into the spa and gave it a room of its own.

The Chenot Espace, in arch, mosaic and steam

The Chenot Espace runs to 4,000 square metres over two floors, with 28 treatment rooms organised into six departments: medical, human performance, medical aesthetic, aesthetic, hydrotherapy, and sport and fitness. It delivers the Chenot Method, developed by Henri Chenot from 1974 and established at Palace Merano in 1984, built on his idea that a long life comes from the combination of genetics, behaviour and environment. Portonovi is the first Chenot Espace within One&Only.

HBA’s palette here is specific and rich: silver travertine, washed grey oak floors, copper accents, shimmering mosaics and sculptural arches, worked in burnt orange, gold and copper. After the platinum and grey of the Palazzo, walking in feels like a change of key.

Two rooms carry the argument.

The hammam is finished in gold mosaic and lit with fibre-optic stars set into the ceiling. That is the oldest gesture in the building type, done in a contemporary way. A traditional hammam admits daylight through small glazed openings punched through a masonry dome, so points of light fall through the steam and move as the sun moves. There is no dome here to pierce, so HBA has achieved the same effect in fibre optic. It is a genuinely knowledgeable piece of design, and it is the moment where Gathy’s Turkish reference stops being a note and becomes a room you can sit in.

The indoor pool is finished in sunset-toned glass mosaic with submerged tuneable-white striplights, set under brass arches, so the water glows from within rather than being lit from above. Anyone who has swum in a hotel pool lit by downlights will recognise immediately how much difference that makes.

Arches, mosaic, steam, copper, and light coming through a ceiling in points. The spa was named World’s Best Hotel Spa at the World Spa Awards in 2025, and the design is a real part of why.

Restaurants with four distinct temperatures

HBA and Social F+B have given each venue its own material world, which is what stops a resort of this size feeling like one long corridor of the same idea.

Caminetti, the lobby bar, is built around a burnt terracotta bar with natural walnut millwork and grigio marble floors, with leather upholstery, backlit forest artwork on the columns and an olive-inspired chandelier. It is the warmest room in the hotel and the one that carries the winter programme.

Sabia takes sand as its subject, which HBA describes as “the transformative beauty of sand, from crystalline forms to flowing coastal textures.” It has an undulating ceiling, marble tables, woven chairs, a walk-through wine room, and hand-blown glass lighting with grains of sand suspended inside it. That last detail is the kind of thing that makes a room memorable years later.

Tapasake Club is worked from wabi-sabi, with marbled concrete floors inlaid with meandering metal, artisanal bronze and mahogany, ombré aqua partitions and a live-edge wood bar framed by amber glass. It faces the marina and it is the sociable heart of the place.

La Veranda runs dark and intimate: indigo blue textures, lacquered panels, antique bronze fixtures and yellow-green tone washes, around Montenegrin cooking over coals.

In the guest rooms there is natural wood flooring, timber millwork, grey and burnished bronze, and a fireplace in every one. The bathrooms are conceived as libraries, in timber millwork and shagreen leather, and in the suites the daybed converts on request into a couple’s tub with recessed taps. Rooms start at 66 square metres, and Villa One runs to 463 square metres inside with 1,750 square metres of garden and terrace around it.

The mimosa in the entrance hall

The detail to end on is the one that could only be here.

The signature commission in the arrival hall is a hand-blown glass canopy in smokey amber, formed as a mimosa tree. The mimosa is Montenegro’s national flower, and Herceg Novi holds an annual Mimosa Festival built around it, when the town fills with yellow in the middle of winter.

In a scheme assembled from stone, travertine, oak and bronze, all of them materials you could find anywhere on this coast, the mimosa is the object that belongs to this particular town. It is a small piece of local knowledge, beautifully made, hung where every single guest walks under it. That is HBA showing its manners.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The temptation with a resort like this is to write the list. Eleven pools, a helipad, two floodlit tennis courts, a superyacht marina and a spa the size of a small gallery.

The list is real, but it is not the achievement. The achievement is that HBA found one idea, the calm of monastic architecture, and let it govern a building that had every commercial reason to be louder. The stone comes from the bay’s own masonry tradition. The proportions come from Palladio by way of Venice. The gold mosaic and the arches come from the Ottoman side of a coastline that spent two centuries as a meeting point. All three sit together without any of them being asked to perform.

Venetian, Turkish and Slav. The first two strands are written in the towns around the bay. The third is now written in a spa, in mosaic and steam and light falling through a ceiling, because HBA went and built it.

That is a rare thing in resort design: a project where the research is visible in the finished surfaces, and where the whole place is quieter, and better, for it.