Zash Country Boutique Hotel & Spa

Listen to the Trees

Zash takes its name from a sound. Zash. The rustle of a breeze moving through the leaves of the citrus trees. It’s an unusually appropriate name for a hotel where nature isn’t scenery added around the architecture, but the starting point for almost everything. The estate lies between Mount Etna and the Ionian Sea, surrounded by citrus groves and fruit trees. At its heart stands a faded rose-coloured manor house once used as a summer retreat by Catania’s nobility and acquired by the Maugeri family in the 1930s. The family initially cultivated vines here before replacing them with citrus and fruit trees during the 1960s. Today, the old estate has entered another life.

Old Manor, Modernist Boxes

The transformation was led by architect Antonio Iraci together with Carla Maugeri, architect and daughter of the owning family. Their idea wasn’t to make everything match. Quite the opposite. Historic fragments have been deliberately placed against contemporary architecture. High ceilings, arched windows, old cellars and weathered surfaces remain, while elsewhere glass, steel, smooth lava stone and precise geometric forms make it perfectly clear which century you’re standing in. The most striking additions are the modern villas scattered through the citrus groves. Essentially glass boxes surrounded by vegetation, they dissolve the traditional boundary between hotel room and garden. At the touch of a button, curtains slide away and suddenly your bedroom appears to be sitting among the lemon trees. It’s modern architecture with a distinctly Sicilian soundtrack.

17 Rooms, Several Ways to Sleep

Part of Zash’s appeal is that the rooms aren’t variations on a single template. Stay in the main villa and the atmosphere is romantic and historical: lofty proportions, pale interiors and windows framing brilliant greens, blues and sometimes Etna itself. The former wine cellars provide something moodier, pairing white surfaces with rough, dark volcanic stone. Then come the unapologetically modern rooms and villas by Iraci Architetti — low beds, lava-stone walls, huge panes of glass and vegetation almost pressing against the windows. The ultimate expression is the 40-square-metre Pool Villa Spa, separated from the main building and surrounded by the citrus grove, with its own terrace, private bathing facilities and views towards both Etna and the sea. Zash lets you choose between inhabiting the estate’s history or sleeping inside its architectural future.

A Pool Cut from Etna

Even the swimming pool belongs to the volcanic landscape. Built using Etna lava stone, it appears almost carved from the dark earth, with the volcano visible beyond. Daybeds disappear into the surrounding greenery and wine tastings can take place beside the water. Beneath the old palmento, the intimate spa continues the theme with dark volcanic stone, a hydrotherapy pool, sauna and hammam. And then there are those citrus trees. Thirteen hectares of them, together with other fruit trees and gardens, create a landscape that smells as memorable as it looks. Orange blossom may be Zash’s most effective piece of interior design.

Dinner in the Old Wine Press

The real surprise comes at dinner. The estate’s former palmento, where grapes were once crushed and fermented, now houses the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. The architecture has lost none of its agricultural drama: lava-stone vaults and an enormous centuries-old wooden wine press remain part of the room. Chef Giuseppe Raciti then takes the same old-meets-new philosophy into the kitchen. Sicilian ingredients and culinary memories are pushed in contemporary directions, moving between the island’s street-food traditions and more elaborate tasting menus. Local citrus, pistachios, seafood, cheeses and produce from the estate and surrounding region keep the cooking firmly anchored in Sicily. The restaurant received its Michelin star in 2019. This isn’t a country hotel that happens to have a serious restaurant. Food is one of the reasons to come.

From Hammam to Aperol

For all the Michelin stars, private pools and architecture, Zash doesn’t feel particularly formal. That’s important. Days have an easy rhythm: breakfast outside, a swim beneath Etna, perhaps a massage, an afternoon wandering through the citrus groves, then an aperitivo before dinner. The location encourages exploration too. Etna’s vineyards and volcanic landscapes are close at hand; Taormina, Catania, the Alcantara Gorges and the Ionian coast can all become day trips. Or don’t go anywhere. Moving from hammam to pool to Aperol to dinner is a perfectly legitimate Sicilian itinerary.

Why It Works

Zash succeeds because its contrasts aren’t treated as problems that need smoothing away. Etna and sea. Manor house and glass box. Rough lava stone and immaculate white walls. Agricultural history and Michelin-starred cooking. They coexist. The result feels contemporary without losing the character of the land beneath it — something many rural design hotels try to achieve, but relatively few manage this convincingly. And when the curtains of a glass villa disappear in the morning and all you can see are citrus trees moving gently outside, the hotel’s peculiar little name suddenly makes perfect sense. Zash.