Can a 310-room resort still behave like a rural estate?

Across sixty hectares in Kakheti, Lopota Lake Resort holds together hospitality, organic winemaking and contemporary Georgian architecture. This autumn, groundworks began on the largest building the estate has ever commissioned

The press is a hollowed block of stone, and the work is done with bare feet. At Rtveli, in September, families cut the bunches, clean them and crush them in the satsnakheli; the juice runs down into clay vessels buried in the ground, and the day closes at a supra, the Georgian feast table, when the light has gone off the vines.

Nothing has been staged for visitors. It is the agricultural year of the Alazani valley, and an estate of sixty hectares has been built around it, on a lake at Napareuli, 115 kilometres east of Tbilisi. Low buildings of timber and concrete follow the water between vineyards and planted forest.

A place this size could behave like any resort anywhere — and yet the days here run outdoors, between the lake, the vines and the forest, and end at shared tables, or in rooms of honey-toned timber and handmade Georgian furniture, each opening onto its own balcony.

Lopota Lake Resort from seven rooms in 2008 to 310 in sixteen buildings

The explanation starts with how the place was built – which is slowly. Goga Maisuradze opened a seven-room hotel by the lake in 2008. Accommodation blocks went up one at a time; halls and pools followed them around the water. An early expansion cycle, backed by the Partnership Fund, Georgia’s state investment fund, added an 84-room complex and an event hall. The sixteenth building opened in 2024 with 80 rooms, taking the total to 310. No master plan ever imposed a single idea on the shoreline, which is why the estate still reads as a settlement and not as a hotel.

Then the founder died, and his daughters Ana and Elene came back to Kakheti to take over. Both are co-owners and managing partners, at the resort and at the winery: Ana on creative direction and guest experiences, Elene, who studied international law, on operations, guest-experience planning and large events.

Ana had started ceramics at six, taking classes from Nato Eristavi, a family friend. Eristavi and her father had talked about bringing ceramic work into the landscape and never found the money. After his death, Ana and Eristavi built Bird of Paradise, an international ceramics symposium first held in 2022 and dedicated to his memory. Visiting artists make and fire their sculptures on site, and the pieces stay, joining a collection that grows in the grounds rather than in a room.

A hall for 800 by four Tbilisi studios at Lopota Lake Resort

The same instinct produced what began in September 2026, when groundworks opened on a hall for 750 to 800 people, the largest single structure the estate has ordered, due about a year later.

Four Tbilisi practices share the drawing, each with a defined scope. About Architecture, led by Vano Ksnelashvili, holds the concept, the detailed design and the site strategy, from layout through to materials and detailing. Studio Gypsandconcrete designs furniture, objects and lighting, including the seating, the bar and the stage pieces. Ruderal, the landscape practice of Sarah Cowles, takes the landscape and the exterior lighting. Paradeigma, the research studio of Irakli Panchulidze, carried the early conceptual and material work through precedents, material studies and models. Capiteli is the structural engineer, Meppers handles mechanical and electrical systems, Akustico the acoustics, LSG Solutions the construction management.

They call the plan “a choreographic village”. Symmetrical pavilions stand under one continuous linear roof, their forms taken from rural Kakhetian houses — gates, façades, the paths between them. The central hall works as a plaza that can be reconfigured, with movable acoustic curtains and daylight falling through openings in the roof. The structure is reinforced concrete, pigmented so that its colour and mass come off the ground and the vineyards around it.

Reception, gift shop and Jazz Club, Georgian studios one commission at a time

The buildings have no single author, and the recent ones were handed to Georgian studios one at a time, each working from what the site already contained.

Studio Gypsandconcrete, founded by Lado Lomitashvili, finished the arrival spaces in 2025. The reception is 291 square metres of glass built like a greenhouse, so the planting stays in view from the moment a guest steps in. The land was a rose plantation once, and rosewood veneers and rose-toned copper answer to that. The desk rests on monolithic blocks of local Lopota marble. Most of the furniture and the decorative lighting were drawn for the room, alongside Santa & Cole fittings and a floor lamp by the Italian designer Bruno Munari for Artemide. Leather left over from the works went back into the project.

The gift shop next door, 48 square metres, turns from the roses to the lake. Mirrored green glass, green-grey stone gravel and waterproof surfaces sit against the original local stone, left exposed. The wall lights are shaped like fishing floats. A decorative column taken out during the works now carries the main display table.

Indoors, the Tbilisi studio 10:10 Interiors finished 84 guestrooms across four of the older buildings in August 2025, built around clay, wood, linen and felt. Two colours run through them, and both come from outside the window: an ash-clay tone taken from the qvevri, a pistachio green taken from the planting. Mariana Chkonia, a Georgian artist, made the textured felt pieces on the walls. The furniture comes from WOOD Crafters, a Georgian woodworking atelier, and the only imported seat in the room is Gervasoni’s Gray Bergère armchair. Floors are honey-toned timber, rugs handwoven jute, bathrooms tiled in black and white or mustard and white.

The one building the founder designed himself, with an architect, is the Jazz Club, opened in 2024 — conceived by Goga Maisuradze, drawn by David Koiava of Design Avenue Studio. Two floors wrap an open circular atrium, rounded concrete and stone outside, thick columns of local timber within. Dark brown, mustard orange and deep blue carry the interior, a copper-ring pendant hangs over the bar, and the bar faces the stage. Akukon, a Finnish consultancy, supervised acoustics, sound insulation and vibration control.

Château Buera, qvevri wine from certified organic vineyards in Napareuli

The wine is what holds the estate to the valley, and it is grown here. Château Buera, founded at Lopota in 2018, works more than five hectares on the northern slope of Napareuli, the protected designation of origin where Kakheti keeps most of its vineyards. The ground is alluvial and rocky. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Merlot grow beside four Georgian varieties — Kisi, Kakhuri Mtsvane, Rkatsiteli, and Saperavi, a grape with red flesh as well as red skin. Every vineyard is certified organic.

Picking is by hand into open boxes, and the berries are sorted on a table. Part of the crop ferments in stainless steel and ages in French oak. The rest goes into qvevri, egg-shaped clay vessels lined with beeswax and sunk to the rim, so the earth holds the temperature steady. The juice ferments there with its skins, the vessel is sealed, and the wine stays underground six months before it moves to oak. Georgians have worked this way for some eight thousand years, and UNESCO added the method to its list of intangible heritage in 2013.

The qvevri wines come out in runs of a few thousand bottles. The Mtsvane reserve of 2020 took gold at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in 2024. The newest bottlings ferment on wild yeast, with as little intervention as the fruit allows.

Forty hectares of planted forest and 500 kilowatts of solar at Lopota

What is not built is the larger part of the estate: green cover takes 80 per cent of the sixty hectares, including forty hectares of planted forest. A solar plant of 460 to 500 kilowatts supplies about a fifth of the electricity. Around 70 per cent of the buildings run energy-efficient heating and cooling, the lighting is entirely LED, and internal transport moves on electric golf carts.

Kakhetian Corner, Oval and IKE, the four restaurants on the estate

Kakhetian Corner cooks traditional Georgian food, indoors and under a covered terrace, and teaches it: the classes work through the preparations rather than demonstrate them. Château Buera handles dishes from across the Georgian regions in a contemporary register, on a menu created by the chef Meriko Gubeladze and served with the winery’s own bottles, in rooms that open onto terraces facing the vineyards and the Caucasus. Oval is the Italian kitchen, with a wood-fired pizza oven and a terrace set among the planting. IKE Asian Fusion sits on the lake, indoors and out, with its own outdoor pool and work made for the space by the Georgian artist Anton Balanchivadze.

The Dining Hall runs separately, breakfast, lunch and dinner as buffets. Drinks pass through the Jazz Club, the Rooftop Bar and the Old Bar, alongside the pool bars and the bungalow outlets.

Forest Spa, Valmont protocols and vinotherapy with Château Buera wine

The spa stands in the wooded part of the estate and has worked exclusively with Valmont, the Swiss skincare house, since 2026. Every treatment uses Valmont products and protocols, and the therapists trained with its specialists. The facials include Vitality of the Glaciers and Lift from the Peaks; Hydration of the Bisses comes with a lymphatic massage. On the body there are Luminosity of Ice, Peaks of Slimness and Bisses Purity, alongside anti-stress, deep tissue, hot stone, Swedish and lymphatic massage.

Two rituals belong to the estate and to nowhere else: a Georgian Forest treatment, and a vinotherapy protocol built on regional ingredients and Château Buera wine. A Slavic bath, a sauna, a hammam and a fitness centre complete it.

Seven pools, the Green Aqua water park and the W50 Lopota tournament

Water is the other constant. Seven outdoor pools and an indoor pool with saunas sit across the grounds, and in the forest the Green Aqua park covers 2,000 square metres with nine attractions, bungalows and relaxation areas for more than 300 people at once.

The four professional tennis courts take international competition: the W50 Lopota tournament was played on them, on outdoor hard, in April 2024. Beyond the courts are pitches for mini-football and basketball, an artificial ice rink, and stables. Bicycles, water bikes, quads and buggies are for hire, the lake is open for fishing, hiking trails cross the estate, and children have a club and eco-playgrounds of their own.