On 16, 17 and 18 October, LVMH opens the doors of its Maisons for the sixth Journées Particulières. Three of the addresses on the list are Belmond hotels. The tours cost nothing, and the booking window opens on 28 September at 2pm Paris time.
The event began in 2011 as a way of letting the public into the places where the group’s houses actually make things. Ateliers, cellars, archives, the odd family home. This edition carries the title At the Source of Dreams and, by LVMH’s own count in July, runs to forty-five Maisons and seventy-one venues across thirteen countries. Most of them are workshops. Three of them have a front desk, a concierge and a bar that will still be open when the tour ends.
Belmond has been part of LVMH since 2019. This year its contribution spans three continents: Rio de Janeiro, the hills above Florence, and Cape Town. Each hotel has chosen one thing to show, and each has put the practical conditions in writing on the LVMH site. They differ, and they matter, so they are below.
Rio
Copacabana Palace has faced Avenida Atlântica since 1923. Its white façade is listed as part of the city’s historic heritage, and Belmond says it is kept by hand, by artisans working to the original design. The visit goes behind that façade. It starts at the theatre, recently renamed for the actress Fernanda Montenegro, and moves through the salons that have held Carnival balls for a century. The word the hotel uses for the tour is private. Given how the building usually works, a ballroom you enter with a ticket or an invitation, that is the whole offer.
The kitchens get a mention too. Two of the hotel’s restaurants, the Cipriani and Mee, hold Michelin stars, and both lean on the seafood and the fruit that Rio has to hand. On 15 September the hotel was named No. 29 in The 50 Best Hotels 2026 at the ceremony in Paris, the highest of the three Belmond entries in the top fifty. The Rio tour is the one of the three that is fully accessible to visitors with reduced mobility.
Villa San Michele, Fiesole. The loggia is attributed to the school of Michelangelo · Courtesy of Belmond
Fiesole
Villa San Michele sits at Via Doccia 4, on the hill of Fiesole with Florence laid out below it. It was a monastery in the fifteenth century, and the façade is attributed to the school of Michelangelo. The gardens run to more than ten thousand square metres of terraces: citrus, lavender, iris, roses. The visit is a guided walk through those gardens and up into the old woodland behind them, the slope of Monte Ceceri where Leonardo da Vinci is said to have tested a flying machine. The hotel has cut a new forest path through it, with a chapel given over to wellness sessions and stations along the route, all facing the city.
Two things to know before you book. The venue is not wheelchair accessible, and the walk is the visit; there is no indoor alternative. Guests who stay will find Alessandro Cozzolino’s kitchen at Antesi and a Guerlain spa, but the free tour is about the hillside, and the hillside is steep. Milan Fashion Week ends on 28 September and the Paris shows close in the first week of October. Fiesole in the third week of October is a different kind of appointment, and the trains from Milano Centrale reach Florence in under two hours.
Forty-five Maisons open their doors for three days. Only three of them will also turn down your bed.
The Splendid EditCape Town
At Mount Nelson, 76 Orange Street, the tour is a single room. The Thebe Magugu Suite opened this year, and Belmond describes it as an Afro-encyclopedic journey, its wallpapers unfolding panoramas of Lesotho, which the listing calls the designer’s homeland. Every object in the suite was made by local artisans. The guided visit walks through the design and the stories behind it, and Magugu House, the concept store in the grounds, is where the same ideas are sold.
The suite sits inside the pink hotel on the slope below Table Mountain and, like Fiesole, is not wheelchair accessible. Mount Nelson came in at No. 34 in the same 50 Best list, a re-entry, and announced three new exhibitions across the hotel in June. Amura, Ángel León’s marine dining room, is the other reason the address has been in the news, and it is not part of the tour.
The booking
Reservations for all three open at the same moment, 28 September at 2pm in Paris, through the Journées Particulières pages on lvmh.com. That is 9am in Rio and 3pm in Cape Town. Each venue page carries a Book Here button that is dormant until then. The tours are free, and every listing is marked as suitable for sensitive audiences, which in LVMH’s phrasing means children and anyone who prefers a quiet room.
Two of the three cities are a long way from anywhere fashion month goes. That is rather the point. The programme is built around origins, and for a hotel company the origin is the building itself. For three days in October the buildings are the exhibit.
Venue descriptions, addresses, access conditions and the reservation date from the Les Journées Particulières 2026 pages on lvmh.com and LVMH news posts of 31 July, 31 August, 15 and 17 September 2026. Rankings from the Belmond press release of 16 September 2026. The Leonardo da Vinci story is local tradition, as the hotel presents it. Train times are approximate.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Copacabana Palace, Villa San Michele