Robert De Niro is creating an island paradise. We eavesdropped on a design meeting

Robert De Niro, the Hollywood titan whose performances over six award-packed decades include starring roles in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, has concerns about the glossy limestone floor destined for the residences he’s building on the Caribbean island of Barbuda. Will it prove slippery for fleet-footed children as they dash in from the beach and pool, he asks?

The assembled design team considers the question, passing De Niro a weighty sample of the stone. He runs his hands across it several times, reassured that the sandblasted texture will serve its non-slip remit, and the discussion moves on.

De Niro is here not as an Oscar and Golden Globe-winning actor but in his other long-term role as a successful hotelier and restaurateur, the co-founder of Nobu Hospitality and co-owner of New York’s The Greenwich Hotel.

He has flown in from his Manhattan home especially for this meeting in Barbuda, Antigua’s smaller, flatter and dramatically less developed sister island. Here, in an airy office open to one of the world’s most extraordinary pink- and white-sand beaches, he and fellow investor, hotelier Daniel Shamoon, are seeing the first interior designs for the 25 turnkey Nobu Beach Inn Residences.

It's all part of a larger development plan called The Beach Club, which will include not only private homes, but a 17-key hotel, Nobu Beach Inn, that's scheduled to open next year. Already, a beachfront restaurant is open, Nobu Barbuda, serving an exclusive clientele who arrive by private jet, helicopter or yacht.

It’s a project that De Niro has had in mind for several decades before investing in it with billionaire businessman James Packer in 2015. He first saw the site over 30 years ago when it was The K Club, a luxury resort that closed in 2004. And what a site it is: over two miles of unspoilt beachfront with 391 acres of mangroves, lakes and lagoons. This design meeting marks a major leap forward for The Beach Club's residential component, which is expected to be completed in 2027.

The design team includes principals from interiors studio Ward & Co, landscape architect Frederica Fantoli and architect Mark Cooney. With Shamoon and the project’s managing director, Katy Horne, the team came by helicopter from Antigua, a 10-minute overwater journey. As De Niro heard the helicopter overhead, he set out from his own beachfront property, one of the only houses currently on-site, to walk barefoot to the meeting.

'Privacy is key,' De Niro says as he considers the location of the guest house on each four and five-bedroom home. 'The aim is a seamless link between indoor and outdoor living, a constant focus on ocean views and open-plan interiors where possible. Character and authenticity are what I think those who come here will want.'

Rather like the style he favours, De Niro is quiet and understated but decisive in his likes and dislikes, eager to refine and reduce rather than add and embellish. Tall metal screens suggested to define the living space are 'too fussy.' Practicality – like those slippery floors – is a concern, but so too are the aesthetics. The actor leans forward to feel textures – the Marmorino plaster intended for the walls, the white oak flooring for the bedrooms. A lengthy discussion about the solid wood kitchen cabinets that De Niro champions over veneer concludes with Cooney’s comments on 'the havoc the climate plays with wood.'

De Niro, Shamoon and Packer are each building their own new homes on site. Shamoon adds that the brief for the residences, all single-storey, was always for a space that appeared to have evolved over time, not one overtly ‘designed’.

When pushed to highlight design inspiration, De Niro references Soho Farmhouse, Como Shambhala and Parrot Cay in Turks and Caicos. 'An unpolished look, one with imperfections that speak to the natural beauty,' he says. Luxury that is, he adds, a million miles from 'chandeliers and endless marble.'

No detail is too small: overstuffed cushions are a particular bugbear – 'reduce the filling by 40 per cent,' he recommends. A pair of built-in bunk beds, one option for a room that could also be a gym or office, gets warm approval from de Niro – a father of seven, the youngest born in 2023 - who says he has a similar feature in his US home 'in the mountains.'

As the meeting ends and De Niro prepares to walk back along the beach to his family, he waves his hand across the dramatic view. 'We’ve worked on this for a long time and we’re making it the way I always thought it would work, with great respect for the nature that is already here and to fit in with the island,' he says. 'Creating something like this is hard, but I’ve always been optimistic, and we’ve kept going. Consistency in your intentions is what matters.'

Shamoon agrees. 'Our shared vision has always been the most important thing. And we are now closer to the day when we will sit on the beach enjoying a martini together as our children run along the beach.' nobubeachinn.com