Now calling the eternal city
Orient Express, one of the most romantic brands on travel, has taken over the Grand Hotel de la Minerve, one of the longest continuous operating hotels in Rome. It is one of several ambitious projects with which the 142 -year -old company rang in 2025; In addition to La Dolce Vita, his new Belfer of a sleeping train, are the palazzo Donà Giovannelli in Venice (which opens in autumn), a Mediterranean navigation yacht called Corinthian (Due to the end of 2026), and a second Paneuropeo Train (2026), with whispers of several more hotels in the pipe.
But for now, all eyes in Orient Express La Minerva, which is impressive enough to have taken into account some local headlines. The location, in the Piazza Della Minerva, just 200 meters from the pantheon (approximately a quarter of the rooms and suites are seen to it), it is ideal. Franco-Mexican artist and architect, thirty-five, Hugo Toro, has taken care of the design, and his work is polished but adventurous: rough stucco, hammered brass, windows of windows coated with hand-painted tiles and a lot of high-ended wooden wood, a nod to the roots of Orient Express in the railway drug. Architecturally, the building is a Hodgepodge of the late seventeenth century, without two exactly the same spaces; Toro mapped singular decoration schemes for all of them, which means that something unique is guaranteed, whether it is a feast -pink frame column sink or an extensive terrace almost as large as its suite. The only common element: the charming frescoes, distributed in broad panel headers, which replicate the diaphanous skies of Rome.
The original statue of the Minerva goddess still presides over the great restaurant of the bar of the ground floor. But the space has received a complete glow for bull, with sidewalks and palm tree clutches in pots that divide it into small more intimate quadrants under a gleam conservative roof. There is a menu throughout the day along with a wine card that pays tribute to the best in Italy (a Bijou ENTECA With its own street entrance it is scheduled to open in a few months). But the main attraction is the second restaurant of the hotel, Gigi Roma, on the seventh floor. Hotel’s panoramic roofs have become a soft arms race here in recent years; This, with its exposure to almost 360 degrees, which receives everything, from the dome of San Pedro to the glorious white clothing that is the Vittoriano, seems to be the one who expires.
Maximalism of the country of wine in South Africa
Franschhoek House, Western Cape
Price: of R111,000 (around £ 4,462) for up to eight people
Click: thanoyalportfolio.com
The residence made a great burst in the world of design as on trips when it opened in Franschhoek in 2008. The Hotel de Capetonian Liz Biden in the main wine country in South Africa marries an extravagant architecture of the French country with the Dutch style of the Cape. The 16 suites that splashed their 30 acres are full of African and Indian antiques, European tapestries and Iran’s carpets.
Franschhoek House, the new independent village of six bedrooms on the property, is an iteration of the next level of that registered trademark. It has everything for the celebration of the great family or the escape of the Reventón group: the chef’s kitchen (in Canarian yellow), a pool table in the large room (with steep roofs and an amazing view of the Drakenstein mountains), private bathroom with independent tubs and private courtyards. The long pool faces the surrounding vineyards, and a 200 -year -old oak says the central courtyard. It is a pastoral of the wine country for the declared maximalist.
Old is beautiful again in the south of Puglia
You could say that Puglia, the stacked heel of the Italian boot, is spiritually divided into two places. There are the most central Fasano and Ostuni, where elegant villas and Anglophone tourists abound; And there is the deep salento, under Lecce: traditionally poorer, more windy, but with some lovely cities, easy access to two seas, Adriatic and ionic, and some of the best beaches in southern Italy.
Palazzo Daniele, in Gagliano del Capo, has been the place to stay here since the art consultant Francesco Petrucci first opened his ancestral home to the public in 2019 (El Palazzo is managed by GS Collection). Petrucci trusted their renewal to the Milanese architects Palomba Serafini Associati, whose intervention added contemporary interest without destroying anything, not the old tiles, partial fresh or unstructured gardens.
The team has just recovered a second wing of the Palazzo, which discovered that it included an entire oil factory; Four large large suites and a living room have been designed from the spaces. A massive mill, original of the FrantioHe sits next to an Osaka sofa by Pierre Paulin; An open octagonal shower is surrounded by mosaic floors of the nineteenth century. Everything is ready just in time for the inauguration of the new social table of Palazzo Daniele, a dinner series program where the guests will meet with chefs and among themselves through multicotor meals that show classical puglian food.
A New York image change in Les Batignolles
The architecture design practice based in New York Roman & Williams, founded in 2002 by Stephen Alesch and Robyn Stander, defends an aesthetic that has a slightly golden age and a little Steampunk, capturing the greatness of the past times and filtering them through a modern urban prism. He has designed everything from film games to the tin building, the review of Jean-Georges Vongerichten of the Fulton fish market of 4,950 square meters in the center of Manhattan as a culinary destination of multiple places.
The Fondation is the first foray of the practice of the practice in France: a 10 -story complex in the “town” of start of Les Batignolles, which combines a hotel of 58 rooms, open joint work spaces, a health club (free for guests of the hotel), and multiple places to eat and drink, including a Tooftop bar.
The building is pure contemporary, of steel and glass that affirm minimalist spaces with a lot of daylight. In them there are thick carpets in layers and deep sofas on intricate parquet floors, with walls, doors and headers dressed in elegant carved wood panels, a little vintage, a little glamor, Roman and Williams par excellence. The original art abounds, although it could have difficulty competing with the views from the upper floors of the hotel.
A high desertides shelter in California
An hour northeast of Palm Springs, the small community of 29 Palms has seen its reputation out. The 12 -room Wren hotel, a new version of a classic Motel in California in the 1940s, opened two months ago here, a few minutes outside the city. His new pleasant face is the work of Manola Studio, based in Los Angeles, whose director Jessica Pell commissioned the carpenters and local artists that produce the hand -painted tiles that cover the bathrooms, the wooden kitchen finished in several of the rooms and the botanical designs painted by hand that the walls rise in the main hall.
The withdrawal atmosphere of the community that cultivates could, for some, to give California a bit. But it will attract others a lot: there is a group of friendly rooms with pets, an ecological salt water pool, a store in the place called Windsong with elegant dispositions, an honesty library, and a policy of strictly guests on 21. Wren House, the two -bed bungalow and two bathrooms on the edge of the property, has a complete chef kitchen and its own chef and its own desert garden.