The stucco facade of an old palace at the head of Via di Ripetta is plain by Roman standards. Sure, it has a beautiful stone portico and beautifully restored window shutters, but no one strolling south from the nearby Piazza del Popolo, with its magnificent twin domed basilicas, would have given it a second glance. number 246.
They would now, at least if they would look inside.
After a 12-year transformation by Neapolitan multimillionaire and the late Zaha Hadid, in what would be one of the Iraqi-British architect’s last projects, the palace has been reborn as a 74-room luxury hotel. Just before Christmas, I am the first journalist to check. I’m surprised by what I find – and not always in a good way.
Romeo Roma, which will fully open this month after years of delays, is the second hotel from Alfredo Romeo, a 71-year-old entrepreneur, newspaper owner, lawyer and property magnate. His first hotel – the Romeo Napoli – landed in his hometown in 2008, in a converted 1950s shipping company headquarters.
At that time, Romeo had already decided on Rome, and in 2012 he noticed the palace for sale. Originally developed in the 16th century by the Serroberti family of Peruvian apothecaries, it then housed the Capponis until the death in 1746 of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi, a noble collector of literature.
After an inheritance dispute, the house was altered, leased, and then sold in 1818. It steadily lost its grandeur and most of its original features as it hosted various occupants such as a deposed Portuguese king and the offices of the National Institute for Insurance Against Accidents at work.
The location appealed to Romeo. The area around Piazza del Popolo, at the northern end of Via del Corso, Rome’s most famous shopping street, had become a high-end center for the capital’s fashionable crowd. Hotels were already part of the draw, with Palazzo Ripetta and the more famous Hotel de Russie just meters from Romeo’s new doorstep.
The obvious solution for a neglected old palace would have been a restoration, perhaps with a hint of the contemporary. But Rome has no shortage of accommodations inspired by its rich lasagna history. With an undisclosed budget that I doubt would have given Nero pause, Romeo was determined to look ahead.
The Italian says Hadid was intrigued when he first met her in 2014, two years before her sudden death aged 65. “She had not created a hotel interior and I wanted her to think of an exclusive design that had never been done before. “- Romeo tells me through a translator. His smart blazer and silk tie do not show his interest in the avant-garde.
The results of their brief and sometimes fraught partnership are surprising. I’m talking to Romeo in the hotel bar, which overlooks a transformed courtyard. He says it’s his favorite space and it embodies the broader approach. Which means, we’re surrounded by incredible amounts of expensive, shiny surfaces.
Ebony is the predominant material – tons of it. In many spaces, the ceilings, walls and floors are decorated with black macassar veneer. Its brown-black grain flows in curves, ridges, spikes and cuts, in a modernist, very Hadidist pattern that takes the forms of classic vaulted ceilings. Some of the craftsmanship is breathtaking.
Where there is no negro, there is enough polished white Carrara marble to sink Caligula’s giant barge. In a recurring motif, raised sculptural fires burst from the walls like large cut bubbles. Inlaid layers of stainless steel flow along the floors and bounce up the walls. Folds clad in bronze shingles shine behind the reception desks, which look as if they were dug out of the ground in huge basalt fistfuls.
Of the original features of the building, only a marble staircase and a bunch of rooms in it noble floor had survived intact. There are now five “alfresco suites”. In one, a staircase in Krion, a type of matte porcelain that has also been widely used, curves around a large sculptural bathtub in a mezzanine bedroom. The bed sits right under centuries-old frescoes and an ornate ceiling. It’s a dizzying juxtaposition.
Romeo Roma is nothing if not original, and anyone sticking to the safe corporate play in much of the luxury hotel market is to be admired. But it’s also a lot. I’m told that the marine top layer of wood was applied to protect Romeo’s investment (he nods when I ask if his negro bill alone would be enough to build a very nice hotel). But the high gloss adds to the overall, slightly claustrophobic feeling of entering a sheikh’s superyacht.
Meanwhile, those sculptural hearths are all fake and have been fitted with fake remote-controlled fires with fake logs and a small, crackling sound effect. They seem incorrigible. But when I diplomatically ask Romeo if he’s happy with the way the shape and the fake fire go together, he says the question hadn’t occurred to him.
Romeo collects benches, and some are comically incongruous (I’m thinking in particular of a bright red metal number in the courtyard that’s shaped like a music pole next to a giant guitar). Then there are the water features. In the palace’s now-covered original courtyard, where carriages would disperse the nobles, Romeo has installed a computer-controlled water curtain against the main wall. A row of dozens of nozzles creates a kind of boisterous water display, illuminated with colored lights, that rapidly displays the words “Romeo” and “Welcome” as the water falls. It would be a bit much at a Disney resort in Dubai, never mind in the middle of Rome.
Behind the palace, a new, larger courtyard is bordered by a newer wing that houses a bathroom and most of the rooms. It includes a magnificent Hadid staircase that rises to a drinks terrace like the ribcage of a Cubist whale. But there is even more rainbow-lit water, flowing from a marble fountain and down the walls next to a fresco of the Virgin Mary.
Romeo freely admits that while he greatly admired Hadid, their opinions often differed. The negro was his idea, so were the fireplaces. “It was mostly the materials that we argued about,” he says. “To him, it was inconceivable that anyone would spend so much to create such structures.”
Perhaps these different views contributed to the delays; Romeo had hoped to open in 2016. He says it was more to do with a Roman ruin discovered under the modern wing and the new courtyard. For nearly five years, archaeologists excavated a suspected tavern, along with chests of artifacts. A small bust of Livia Drusilla, wife of the emperor Augustus, now watches over the old courtyard. A pool in the new courtyard includes a glass floor above the ruins.
For all his quixotic strength, Romeo triumphs in many areas. Alain Ducasse has done amazing things at the flagship restaurant, only the second in Italy (the first opened in Romeo Napoli last June). A tasting menu executed by French food wizard protégé and head chef Stéphane Petit, who is 29, is a far more brilliant marriage of old and new, as well as Italian and French (burnt puntarelle with anchovies and a delicate pot-au-feu stand outside).
The dining room itself, which overlooks Via di Ripetta and is dressed mostly in black, is also remarkable. The square columns flow into arched canopies that are lit from behind through long, cut-out openings. Marble walls and an open, gleaming steel kitchen bring more light into the space.
Parts of the Sisley spa are also spectacular, including a relaxation room lined with Italian pink salt bricks and a wood-shaped gym that benefits from avoiding the high-gloss treatment. Lacquered ebony, meanwhile, dominates my bedroom, which is a masterpiece of modernist cabinetry anyway – fake fireplace and all.
Whatever one thinks of his vision, Romeo was wise to recruit two creative heavyweights to bring it to life; a number of market-leading openings in the past five years have included Six Senses, Rome Edition, W and Hotel Bulgari, which occupies the grand 1930s headquarters of the Italian social security agency (I’ll drink your cocktail more ironic).
They are all modern spaces competing for the same international market, yet none can claim a Hadid or a Ducasse in its marketing. That Romeo thinks he has an advantage is clear in his prices. They start at €2,450 per night for the smallest digs (rising to €37,000 for the largest), which is a chunk higher than any of the properties above.
Perhaps Romeo, which plans to open its third hotel on the Amalfi Coast later this year, is also trying to recoup some of the money it has poured into the country. At one point, he whispers the total bill, before later asking me not to split it. Let’s just say that, on a per-room basis, I doubt you’d struggle to find a more expensive hotel.
“It seems financially unsustainable,” Romeo tells me with a half-smile, before overseeing the repositioning of a new couch next to his digital water curtain. “But beauty is always an investment.”
The details
Simon Usborne was a guest of Romeo Roma (theromeocollection.com) where double rooms cost from €2450 per night
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