When You're Here, You're Home
An introduction to Italy Access Advisory.
Written by Christian Scali, Founder
"When you're here, you're home."
That's the line we settled on for Villa Ardore, and I've never wanted to change it, because it's not a marketing phrase we came up with after the fact. It's the inspiration for the entire project. Every decision, from which walls stayed to how a guest is greeted at the door, is measured against this guiding through-line: does this feel like home?
I think that standard is also the real answer to why Italy Access Advisory exists, and why I'm an advocate for hospitality investment in Italy.
I've practiced business law in California for 27 years. I'm the Founder and Managing Shareholder of Scali Rasmussen, a boutique business law firm I built starting in 2013, with an active desk in Rome supporting cross-border clients. The firm is recognized by Chambers USA — specifically its California Spotlight in Labor & Employment and Franchise — and, as of this year, by Legal 500. I was named a Southern California Super Lawyer and a "Legal Visionary" by the Los Angeles Times. My work has always centered on the same core discipline: structuring deals, navigating regulation, and protecting people's investments in complex, high-stakes situations.
But the reason I understand Italian hospitality specifically — not as a legal category, but as a lived, operational reality — is Villa Ardore.
My husband, Stephen, and I restored a 500-year-old stone farmhouse in Chianti Classico into an eight-suite luxury villa, working with Florentine architect Massimo Pieratelli to protect everything that made the building extraordinary while quietly solving the infrastructure problems that come with historic, protected architecture. The restoration took eighteen months and €2.5 million. It opened in the summer of 2023, and a private spa followed the year after. Today, guests arrive to eight suites across the main villa and the Dependence, a heated infinity pool over the vineyards, and a wine cellar built into the original stone structure. Since opening, Villa Ardore has been featured by CNN Travel, Condé Nast Traveler, Robb Report, Grazia USA, Matador Network, OutThere Magazine, and Luxury Travel Advisor — recognition that reflects what guests actually experience, not just what we say about it.
Building that project meant assembling a full team: architects, engineers, contractors, financial advisors, hospitality operators, marketing and guest-experience specialists, coordinated across two countries and two legal systems. That team is still intact. It became LV Toscana, the hospitality management company we formed to run Villa Ardore, and it's now the operational core of Italy Access Advisory, which I built in partnership with Christopher Henry of Majestic Hospitality Group. Christopher's firm has led development on more than $550 million in active hospitality projects worldwide, including Andaz Costa Rica Resort, Fusaki Beach Resort in Okinawa, and Cabo Wave Hotel in Mexico.
This combination is what makes the advisory different from a broker or a law firm working alone. I bring the legal and regulatory expertise to structure investment correctly on both sides of the Atlantic. I also bring the perspective of someone who has personally acquired, restored, licensed, staffed, and operated a successful luxury hospitality property in Italy, from the first conversation with an architect to the day a guest first walked through the door. Christopher brings institutional-caliber development and feasibility expertise built across hotels and resorts on nearly every continent. Together, our team gives clients something rare: representation that understands investment as both a legal structure and a business.
Our clients agree. As one current IAA client put it:
The value of the owner's representation we offer is the ability to conduct a property search and acquisition almost entirely remotely, with full confidence, because the team on the ground already has the relationships, the fluency, and the judgment to make the right calls without requiring travel for every decision.
You should feel at home in this process, confident that the person representing you has actually done it, and trusts the team executing it with your project as much as I did my own.
In other articles, you'll find content on how to choose the right kind of hospitality project for your goals, what real due diligence looks like on an Italian hospitality investment, how these ventures get structured operationally once you own one, and how you maintain genuine oversight of a project from anywhere in the world.
Most importantly, you'll find a group of industry experts who believe more investment in Italian hospitality is the right move, at a moment when the numbers back that belief: Colliers reported €1.4 billion in Italian hotel investment in the first half of 2025 alone, the highest in five years. We've backed that belief with our own personal investments. You can't find a stronger proof of concept.
If you've been looking for an advisor to treat your project with as much care and consideration as his own, welcome home.
— Christian