Hotel Tresanton began in the 1940s as a yachtsman’s club, a cluster of old houses on the waterfront at St Mawes in Cornwall. When Olga Polizzi redesigned it, opening it as her hotel in 1998, she went looking for a boat to go with it and was led to Pinuccia, an 8 Metre racing yacht built in Italy on the eve of the Second World War, lying in a shed in Holland. Pinuccia still moors below the hotel. A wedding at Tresanton keeps the same company: vows in a licensed room overlooking the terrace, champagne on the waterside terraces, and dinner looking across the Carrick Roads to St Anthony’s lighthouse.
A club for yachtsmen at the mouth of the Fal
St Mawes stands at the end of the Roseland Peninsula, on the eastern side of Falmouth harbour. The water in front of the village is the Carrick Roads, the estuary of the River Fal: a valley drowned after the last ice age and deep enough in many places for large ships to anchor midstream. Henry VIII built St Mawes Castle and Pendennis Castle on opposite shores between 1540 and 1542 to guard that anchorage, and in 1835 Trinity House lit St Anthony lighthouse at the eastern entrance to the harbour to steer ships clear of the Manacles. That lighthouse is the view from Tresanton’s terraces and from most of its bedrooms.
The hotel is made up of five whitewashed houses above Tavern Beach on Lower Castle Road. Olga Polizzi, the daughter of Lord Forte and sister of Sir Rocco Forte, is Deputy Chairman and Director of Design at Rocco Forte Hotels. She spent two years redesigning Tresanton, and it opened as her hotel in 1998. It is now one of three hotels in the Polizzi Collection, with Hotel Endsleigh in Devon and The Star at Alfriston in East Sussex. It was her husband, the author William Shawcross, who introduced her to St Mawes; he had spent the summers of his childhood on Falmouth Bay.
The yacht built to win back a cup
Pinuccia belongs to the years when metre class racing was a matter of national pride. In 1937 Bona, an 8 Metre designed by Vincenzo Vittorio Baglietto, won the Coppa d’Italia at Genoa, a silver cup given in 1898 by King Umberto I. The following year Italy lost it to a yacht owned by the Swedish industrialist Marcus Wallenberg, and Baglietto designed and built Pinuccia at his yard in Varazze to win it back. The 1939 contest was sailed in Wallenberg’s home waters at Sandhamn, near Stockholm. Pinuccia finished second, and as Europe went to war she stayed in Sweden.
A legend grew around her. By the 1990s the story ran that Mussolini had ordered the yacht himself and, on hearing of the defeat, recalled her crew to join the army. Lloyd’s Register gives a plainer account: her owner in 1939, and again in 1947 when she raced for the cup once more, was Angelo Rizzoli, owner of an Italian publishing firm, whose daughter was called Pinuccia. Rizzoli was close to Mussolini, and Italy wanted the cup back, but the Baglietto yard says it never built a yacht for Mussolini.
She was sold to an owner in Gothenburg in 1950, later sailed in Norway and Finland, and was bought by a Dutch syndicate in 1994. Shawcross had hoped to find a Fife for Tresanton; instead he and Olga Polizzi were told of Pinuccia lying in a shed in Holland. She came by road to Salcombe to be made seaworthy, and she has sailed from St Mawes ever since. She is built of mahogany on oak and elm frames, 48 feet 2 inches overall, and her planking is original.
From May to the end of September her skipper takes guests sailing around Falmouth Bay and up the Helford River, for up to six at a time. An early sail leaves at six in the morning and returns in time for breakfast on the terrace; a whole day runs from ten until four, with a picnic.
Vows in the Mosaic Room, or at St Just
Tresanton holds a civil licence, so marriages and civil partnerships can take place in the hotel, for up to 50 guests. The principal room is the Mosaic Room, a large room overlooking the terrace, with a mosaic floor and the sea in the distance, that is also used for screenings. For a ceremony of twelve or fewer, the Dogs’ Bar has a nautical feel and an open fire, with ceremonies between 11.30am and 3pm. Ceremonies start from £500. The registrar is booked directly with Cornwall Council in Truro and charges separately, and ceremonies run all year except in August and at Easter, Christmas and New Year.
For a church wedding, the hotel can give contacts for the churches of St Mawes, including its Catholic church, and for St Just in Roseland, a walk of about two and a half miles past St Mawes Castle. The church of St Just is listed at Grade I, with a battlemented tower, a carved granite porch doorway and a painted panel of the Lord’s Prayer dated 1693. It stands among subtropical planting, and Sir John Betjeman called its churchyard “to many people the most beautiful churchyard on earth”.
Champagne on the terraces, dinner by the sea
After the ceremony, the Nook, the hotel’s private waterside terrace, takes up to 50 for champagne and canapés before lunch or dinner, or 30 at a seated meal. Across the road and directly below the hotel, the Beach Club is a series of three terraces set just above the waterline, with blue and white striped umbrellas and semi-tropical planting. It can be reserved for a party from 10am to 9pm, for a lunch of up to 50. Between May and September it hosts Tresanton’s summer barbecue, with local seafood, salads, grilled meat and fish and West Country cheeses, cooked to order by a chef working for the party alone. If the weather turns, the Mosaic Room is held back for the move indoors.
Paul Wadham has led the kitchen for 20 years and writes each wedding menu with the couple, working with local suppliers. The kitchen asks for one dish per course for the whole party, with a vegetarian choice where needed. Dishes served at recent events include St Mawes scallops with rosemary and pancetta, Porthilly oysters with shallot vinegar, and red mullet with a lobster raviolo, and the hotel makes its own ice cream. Canapés, dinner and coffee are £120 per person.
When the hotel is taken on exclusive use, the wedding breakfast moves into the restaurant, which looks out to sea and seats up to 70 at three long tables, with hurricane candles lit on the terrace as night falls. Afterwards the Mosaic Room becomes the dance floor. Without exclusive use there is no evening music and dancing at Tresanton; couples who want a party after dinner can hire St Mawes Castle or the St Mawes Hotel for the evening.
A highlights film of Gemma and Jeff’s wedding at Tresanton, by the videographer Noah Werth, is on Vimeo.
The whole hotel, from October to mid March
From October to mid March the whole of Tresanton can be taken for a wedding: all 30 bedrooms, the terraces, the restaurant, the public rooms and the Beach Club. Exclusive use costs £6,000 per night, with the bedrooms charged on top, and a weekend booking needs at least two nights. Without exclusive use the party can reserve up to ten rooms, and the hotel will suggest other places to stay nearby.
The bedrooms are spread across the five houses, each designed by Olga Polizzi with antiques and Cornish art, and most look out to sea; many have a terrace of their own. There are three family suites, and one bedroom in the Larorran Suite is fitted out as a ship’s cabin, lined in tongue and groove, with two built-in bunks. Four rooms take dogs.
Summer or winter
St Mawes is about 40 minutes by road from Truro and its railway station and about 50 minutes from Newquay airport; from London it is around five hours by car. A passenger ferry crosses all year from Falmouth, less than a mile away by water against a drive of some 30 miles round the estuary. For the wider county, see Cornwall wedding venues and the Cornwall Wedding Atlas.
The decision to make first at Tresanton is the season. A summer wedding, outside August, brings the Nook, the Beach Club barbecue and Pinuccia under sail, with up to ten rooms for the party and no dancing after dinner. A winter wedding brings the whole hotel, 70 at dinner in the restaurant and dancing in the Mosaic Room, but Pinuccia’s sailing season ends with September. Couples who know which they want can read the Hotel Tresanton profile and check your date.
