Palazzo Talìa in Rome is the director’s first foray into designing a hotel through his interior-architecture practice Studio Luca Guadagnino
Fans of the Italian film director and producer Luca Guadagnino know his oeuvre to be lush with design elements: from “Call Me By Your Name”’s idyllic countryside setting to “Suspiria”’s hair-raising moody interiors.
Guadagnino’s latest project, however, is more real than fiction: a 16th-century collegio in Rome’s Rione di Trevi turned luxury 26-room boutique hotel called Palazzo Talìa.
Unbeknownst to some of his fans, Guadagnino established an interior-architecture studio in Milan in 2017. The eponymous studio specializes in contemporary mid-century Italian design. Among his design work, he lists a Lake Cuomo home replete with color, Aesop stores in Rome and London, and a retail space in New York.
For Palazzo Talìa, the Oscar-nominated director designed all public-facing spaces from the sitting rooms and verdant courtyard to the restaurant and subterranean spa, plus the hotel’s signature suite. This is his first foray into hospitality.
Every detail begs the guests to touch them, something Guadagnino welcomes and even encourages. “Tactility and materiality are everything,” studio designer and hotel project lead Pablo Molezún said in an interview. “Every surface and item is conceived with material three-dimensionality. This, and how the lines of the ground floor envelop you—they are what make the experience of the spaces intimate.”
Prior to the hotel’s previous life as a collegio, in the 17th century, the palazzo was home to nobles and high prelates. The institution which educated the sons (and eventually daughters) of aristocracy was then equipped with a theatre, new classrooms, staircases, galleries, frescoes, and a delightful indoor garden in the 1700s. The school closed down in 1999 as families began moving into cities, leaving the structure in a slow decline.
It was only this year that restoration efforts by property developers Gruppo Fresia started. “Our challenge is combining the intimacy of an open and welcoming home with the grandeur of a place so steeped in history,” Palazzo Talìa’s website reads. “For this reason, the monumental spaces have been transformed into stage settings designed by Studio Luca Guadagnino.”
Describing his approach to designing the hotel’s common spaces, Guadagnino said, “The aesthetic is maximalist but with the rigor, let’s say, of minimalism. Because if you apply minimalism per se, you lose the thread of the pleasure.”
The interiors are filled with sensual details: one-off furniture made by the studio mixed with special editions by revered designers like Gae Aulenti and commissioned pieces by Italian artisans; plush custom-designed carpets in luscious palettes; hand-made finishings on the staircase railings; and a 3-meter tall museum-quality 1940s chandelier designed by the Venetian artist Napoleone Martinuzzi that hangs on the reception foyer.
An overnight stay at Palazzo Talìa costs anywhere between P40,000 to P50,000 depending on the room type.