Six floors that agreed to be a hillside
3LHD stepped 209 rooms down the slope above Monte Mulini bay and planted the roofs. The profession gave it a medal for urbanism, not for architecture — which is the most accurate thing anyone has said about it.
There is a way of building on the Adriatic that everyone recognises and nobody defends: a white block with a red roof, dropped on a headland, turned to face whatever the plot allowed. Rovinj has one of the best medieval silhouettes on the coast, and for fifty years the hotels looking at it were built as though the view had turned up by accident.
The Grand Park is the opposite argument, made at scale. Two hundred and nine rooms across six floors, each floor set back from the one below, so that the building goes down the slope rather than standing on it. From the marina it reads as a stack of planted ledges. From the town across the water it mostly reads as trees.
Whether that counts as disappearing is the interesting question, and it is worth coming back to at the end.
The same studio, the same bay, twice
3LHD was founded in Zagreb in 1994 by Saša Begović, Marko Dabrović, Tatjana Grozdanić Begović and Silvije Novak. They had already built in this bay: Hotel Lone opened a few hundred metres up the same slope in 2011, and before that came the Riva waterfront in Split and the Memorial Bridge in Rijeka.
Eight years after Lone, the same studio got the site next door and a brief roughly four times the size. I cannot think of another Croatian example of one practice being handed the same hillside twice, far enough apart to have changed its mind about it.
The section is the building
Most large hotels are an elevation problem. This one is a section problem, and 3LHD solved it before they drew a façade. Six levels, each offset from the one beneath, so the floor plates track the fall of the ground and the setbacks become terraces deep enough to plant. Rooms take the lower floors. The fourth and fifth work as pavilions under deep canopies with planted roofs, holding the restaurants, the congress hall and the wellness floor. The pool on top sits inside a glass pavilion that opens in summer.
Unlike almost every hotel on this coast, this one comes with its numbers. The architects publish them: a footprint of 15,497 m², 35,361 m² of building, 181,811 m³ of volume, on a site of 46,813 m². Structural engineering was Ivan Palijan’s, and it was interesting enough on its own that Oris House of Architecture gave him an evening to talk about it in December 2019.
3LHD also say the congress hall carries the largest glass window in Europe. Their own more careful version is a single pane of 15 by 3.2 metres — 48 m², over 5.2 tonnes, the largest produced in the EU. Nobody has certified either version, and the two are not the same sentence. The second is the one worth repeating.
The park in the name
The landscape is the credit most often reported wrongly — at least one big architecture database hands it to the interior designer. Two Croatian studios did it, on two separate scopes: Nataša Tiška Vrsalović of Dionaea-vrtovi took the building and the ground immediately around it, and Katja Sošić of Studio KAPPO the wider zone — 31,000 m², which won a BIG SEE award of its own in 2021, separately from the building’s.
The City of Rovinj published the planting schedule in September 2018, and it is the most honest document in the whole file, because it counts in both directions.
Trees planted across the 3.12-hectare scheme: 215 pines in two size grades, 79 holm oaks, 30 cypresses, 11 maples, six rowans and four honey locusts, with more than 5,000 shrubs and perennials. The same document records 34 trees taken out by sanitary felling and 112 tall shrub specimens cleared.
Five Aleppo pines that had stood on the site for more than fifty years were kept, lifted and set on the first-floor terrace. One awards database has since turned that into “century-old pine trees”. They are fifty, not a hundred, and the smaller number is the better story: these are trees that watched the previous hotel go up.
What it is pointed at
3LHD describe the hotel as “a viewpoint for the most beautiful stage on the Adriatic”, and say the intention was that wherever a guest stands, they should feel they are in a park looking at Rovinj. That is the architects’ sentence, not a critic’s, and every outlet that covered the building has repeated it. It is also, standing on the fourth floor at seven in the evening, difficult to argue with.
Here is the tension in it. Studio KAPPO’s own award submission says the existing planting was “carefully thinned out to provide panoramic views”. So the forest the building blends into was also, in places, edited so the building could see past it. Both sentences are true — and the second comes from the landscape architect, not a critic, because no critic has published a reading of this building at all. For a project of this size in a country this small, that absence is its own small fact.
The medal it actually won
In September 2020 the Croatian Chamber of Architects gave the Grand Park its Medal for Urbanism for 2019. Not the architecture medal. The urbanism one. That is the correct award and it is worth stopping on.
The building’s real subject is not its elevation. It is the ground floor — a public promenade tying the old town to the Punta Corrente forest park; the landscape that reads as a city park and is used like one; and the fact that this is the last piece of a bay one company assembled over a decade: Monte Mulini in 2009, Lone in 2011, Eden rebuilt in 2017, the ACI marina alongside, this in 2019. About 1.5 billion kuna into a single bay, roughly 700 million of it here.
The jury reached for the word grandioznost — grandiosity — and wrote that the scale of the project’s spatial move required a matching departure from the jury itself. Read that twice. It is admiring, and it is also the profession noting, in its own careful register, that something unusually large happened here.
Inside
The interiors are Piero Lissoni’s, out of Milan. His studio appears under four different names across the project’s own press material, which is a Milanese problem rather than a Croatian one. Lissoni described the palette as running from “night blue to white and from Bordeaux to khaki”. There are 193 rooms and 16 suites, a spa of 3,800 m² over two floors, and three pools.
The two stars, and where they are
Agli Amici Rovinj is on the premises and holds two Michelin stars, awarded in June 2024 and held again in 2025 and 2026. It was the first two-star restaurant in Croatia. It is the Rovinj outpost of the Scarello family’s restaurant in Udine, and Emanuele Scarello cooks.
Cap Aureo, the hotel’s own restaurant, took its first star in July 2025 under Jeffrey Vella. It opened with the building in 2019 and waited six years for it — worth saying, because the two are routinely reported the other way round.
The hotel itself holds one Michelin Key from the first Croatian selection in 2025. In October of that year it entered The World’s 50 Best Hotels at number 48, the only Croatian hotel that list has ever carried.
Why this one is not like the others
Croatian coastal tourism is, structurally, a great many small owners on a great many small plots. The good buildings tend to be one-offs, built despite the pattern rather than because of it. The Grand Park is the product of the opposite condition: one owner, one bay, ten years, and a single practice handed the same slope twice. Whatever anyone makes of the result, that is a planning situation almost nothing else on this coast has been given.
It carries the awkwardness that comes with it. A building confident enough to publish its own volume in cubic metres is not hiding. And a building awarded a medal for urbanism has been told, by its own profession, that its strongest argument is the ground it sits on rather than the thing sitting there.
The forest it blends into was also, in places, thinned so the building could see past it.
Eight rooms will fit under a roof of olives, which is why Villa Nai’s vanishing act holds. Two hundred and nine will not, and the Grand Park does not really pretend otherwise. It steps and it plants, and from the town, from the water and from most of the promenade, that works.
From the marina it is unmistakably a large building, and the terraces read as exactly what they are: a very good way of making a large building sit down. That is not a complaint. It is the more interesting version of the compliment.
No architectural criticism published in Croatian — the record here is international.
