Project: Boscolo Exedra, Milan
Design: Studio Italo Rota
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Size: 15,000 sqm
Completion time: 12 months
That the Boscolo Exedra, the seventh five-star hotel in the flamboyant Boscolo chain, looks so different from any other hotel is no accident. Italian architect Italo Rota is well known for his exuberant architecture and interior design, such as the colour-changing house he created for fashion designer Roberto Cavalli in Florence. But in this case Rota was chosen precisely because of his lack of ‘relevant experience’.
He’d never designed a hotel before and on the strength of that the chain’s founder Roberto Boscolo believed he was the right man for the job.
As with the chain’s other six hotels, creating the Boscolo Exedra involved the renovation of an existing building. Here is was an eight-storey former bank, built in the Twenties in Milan’s Corso Matteotti. Fittingly, given its location at the heart of Milan’s fashion district – not to mention its proximity to the Piazza San Babila, the Scala and the Duomo – the Boscolo Exedra has been conceived and designed as a ‘destination hotel’, meaning it’s as welcoming to casual visitors to its three restaurants and luxurious spa as it is to hotel guests. As a taster of the fun and eccentric design within, Rota placed large fish tanks in two of the windows: a reminder that this is not a haughty, exclusive hotel.
Of the 154 guest rooms no two are quite alike. Each has been fitted-out with the finest Italian-made furniture by the likes of Driade, Artemide, Fontana Arte and Tom Dixon. But the design of this hotel is unapologetically extrovert, and it’s the fantastic public spaces that are standout.
An entrance hall, with a floor in white Carrara Tuscan marble, leads to an triple height space dominated by two sculptures made of tubular steel etched in bronze. These ‘nests’ as Rota calls them, sit at the centre of twin helicoid staircases, which lead to the reception, art gallery and restaurants on the floor below.
With Rota in charge, the layout of the Boscolo Exedra was never going to be conventional, and the decision to hide the reception desk away on the lower ground floor, rather than placing it by the entrance, was deliberate. A member of staff greets guests as they enter, so that they don’t really feel like they’ve walked into a hotel at all.
This public space is lit by a ‘smart lighting’ system comprising more than 4,000 LEDs of various colours, which automatically change colour and intensity depending on the time of day, and even react to the changing seasons.
The twin staircases lead down to the first of three restaurants, whose white columns are emblazoned with triangles of mirrored steel coated in coloured transparent paint: the resulting pattern evokes the multicoloured costume of the character Harlequin from the Italian commedia dell’arte.
A bar with a black glass top and black lacquered base by Italian furniture company Meritalia is decorated with sheets of pierced stainless steel shaped like petals and lit from above by a collection of pendant lights by Tom Dixon. Meritalia also supplied the couches and tables.
Recesses in the ceiling containing LED lights arranged in a ‘molecular pattern’ run through the reception area and into the ‘museum hall’, an area used to display art. Here, walls and supporting columns are covered with gloss-black lacquered boiserie; loose furniture is by Meritalia.
The largest of the three restaurants continues the black scheme of the museum hall. A long, gently curving wall has eight bay windows, which provide intimate seating areas. The area around each window is panelled with mirror-coated steel which graduates to shiny black, and perforated and lit by LEDs. The windows themselves are laminated with graphics of trees and plants. The floor is polished wood panelling with a bold, striped grain.
In a luxurious champagne room guests are served from a curvaceous bar made of white Corian with a built-in champagne sink. Behind that, bottles are artfully arranged on shelves, also made of white Corian, with padded gloss leather and Swarovski crystals. Lighting is a cluster of copper lamps by Tom Dixon.
There is, unfortunately, not enough space here to review architect Simone Micheli’s fabulous spa and wellness centre, Atomic Spa Suisse, which is part of the hotel.
While the appeal of this brilliantly designed hotel is international, its identity is unapologetically Italian, from the choice of architects to the construction elements and finishes, the finest Italian furniture (even the pieces by British designer Tom Dixon were manufactured in Italy) and the cuisine in each of the three restaurants, almost everything is prodotto in Italia. Well, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Project Suppliers:
Furniture and custom-made sculptures:
Loose furniture and Lighting:
Materials:
Word by Jamie Mitchell
