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Back to portfolioFourteen rooms and four suites on a shelf of rock eighty-four metres above the Tyrrhenian, between Positano and Amalfi. A grotto spa cut into the tufa. One table for twenty-four.
Ettore Sabbia built the house in 1911 with money made shipping Sorrento walnut out of Naples, and named it for the dark volcanic sand of the cove beneath it. It stayed in the family for four generations and was more or less closed for the last thirty of them.
We spent four years and rather too much money bringing it back with the Milanese architect Chiara Bonvicini — the tufa left raw where it wanted to be raw, the 1930s Vietri floors lifted, numbered and relaid, and not a single additional storey added. It reopened in June 2019 with eighteen keys and a house rule that nothing here should ever feel like a hotel lobby.
— Tommaso Vitale, Direttore
Rates are per night for two, including breakfast on the pergola, the harbour transfer from Positano or Amalfi, and unlimited use of the grotto spa. Below are low-season rates; the full seasonal table is at the foot of this page.
On the garden side, where the reeds that give the room its name still grow against the old cistern wall. Lime plaster, a bed built from a single slab of walnut, and shutters that open onto the lemon terrace at breakfast.
The first of the sea rooms. A private balcony wide enough for two chairs and a bottle, hung directly over the drop to Cala Marina, with nothing between you and the water but ninety metres of warm air.
Two rooms under a vaulted ceiling, angled to catch the light that comes off the Furore fjord in the late afternoon. The writing desk was made from the deck boards of a Positano gozzo broken up in 1974.
The suite the house is named for: a plunge pool cut into the terrace and finished in black sand plaster, so the water reads the colour of the cove below. Breakfast arrives on the terrace at whatever hour you name.
The 1911 watchtower, and the only key that reaches it. Two terraces, one facing Positano and one facing Amalfi, a private stair to the cove, and a roof from which you can see the lights of Capri on a clear night.
Twenty-two metres below the terrace, reached by a stair cut in 1911 for hauling boats, there is a chamber in the tufa the family used as a cold store. It is now a nine-metre salt pool, a steam room, a clay room and two treatment beds, lit by candle after eight in the evening. Rosa Lentini, who trained at the thermal baths on Ischia, has run it since we opened.
Black sand exfoliation, salt float, wild fennel oil, and a long silence afterwards on the grotto bench.
Deep tissue in the old fishermen’s manner — forearms, slow pressure, olive oil pressed at Tramonti.
A resurfacing facial using citrus enzymes from the Erbario Sorrentino, made for skin that has been in the sun.
The tufa steam chamber and clay room, reserved privately for two, with mint tea and cold towels.
An evening ritual for the sleepless: warm shells along the spine, weighted linen, lavender from the upper terrace.
Twenty-four covers under the pergola, named for Nicola Ferrante’s grandmother, who still rolls the scialatielli on Fridays. One star since the 2023 guide. Dinner only, Tuesday to Sunday, one seating at 19:30 and one at 21:15. Non-residents are welcome when we have room, which is not often in August.
€185
€120
1,410 labels
The house lemons, Sfusato Amalfitano, from eleven terraces above the road.
Anchovies of Cetara, cured six days
colatura, fennel pollen, bread baked in the wood oven at 06:00
Raw amberjack, lemon leaf, sea fig
landed at Praiano the same morning by the Esposito brothers
Scialatielli, sea urchin, burnt butter
pasta rolled by Marisa Ferrante, who is eighty-one
Red mullet, grilled over vine cuttings
with the first tomatoes from the Vitale plot at Furore
Kid goat from the Lattari hills, thyme, its own jus
or, for the table, turbot roasted whole on the bone
Fior di latte, honey from Agerola, black pepper
cheese made that morning, eight kilometres up the hill
Lemon, all the way through
delizia, granita, and a glass of the house limoncello, aged nine months
The lower terrace, 17:00 until late, for guests and their friends. Ask for Il Cannetto — gin, wild fennel, our lemon, a pinch of sea salt from Cetara. €22, and it is the drink to have at the exact moment the sun goes.
Thursdays only. One long table set in the lemon grove above the house, twelve places, whatever Nicola has bought that morning at the Amalfi quay. €240 including wine. Book at the desk on arrival; it fills the same day.
07:30 — 11:00 on the pergola, or on your own terrace at any hour you like, including hours we would rather you did not name.
Beatrice Ferrara has been the concierge here since 2019 and knows every skipper, kiln and trailhead between Sorrento and Salerno. This is what she would have you do with a single day, if you asked her — and most guests do, on the first morning, over coffee.
Beatrice drives you to the Bomerano trailhead and meets you at Nocelle four hours later with cold water and a car. Eight kilometres, one thousand steps down, and the whole coast on your right the entire way.
Our 1962 gozzo, restored in Amalfi and skippered by Gennaro. The Furore fjord, the Emerald Grotto before the ferries reach it, lunch anchored off Conca dei Marini. Half day €680, full day €1,120, up to six.
Two hundred and eleven steps down from the house to Cala Marina, where there is a single table under a fig tree and no menu. We will send a basket down and telephone ahead.
A standing appointment with the Solimene workshop, where the tiles in your bathroom were painted. Anything you commission is crated and shipped within three weeks.
The Belvedere terrace at Villa Rufolo, six hundred metres above the water, with the orchestra playing into open air. We hold seats from June through September; ask at least a week ahead.
The salt pool in the grotto stays open, lit only by candle, until midnight. There is a bell if you would like a negroni brought down; there is nobody else there.
The most quietly assured house to open on this coast in a decade. It does not perform hospitality at you; it simply removes, one by one, every reason you might have had to leave.
We have stayed on this coast for twenty years and never once been left alone properly. Sable House understood by the second morning exactly how much attention we wanted, and gave us not one degree more.
My wife swam in the grotto every night at eleven. On the fourth night the pool had been lit with forty candles and nobody said a word about it, before or after.
Marisa alone justifies the journey. Seven courses, twenty-four covers, and a wine list that quietly humiliates most of Campania.