Fashion Hotels: Ferragamo's Florence Hotels

August 16, 2006 at 8:53 AM | by juliana | 0 Comments

Fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo may have been one of the first designers to get in on the Fashion Hotel trend.

The company owns and operates three hotels in Italy (where most of these fashion hotels tend to open first)---Florence to be exact, where the company is headquartered.

The Gallery Hotel Art opened in 1999 and doubles as an art gallery. The lobby is described as cool and minimalist, the rooms are impeccably styled featuring caramel leather headboards and Japanese-inspired stools below the sink. There's also a fushion sushi bar and restaurant downstairs and of course, the Salvatore Ferragamo store is just steps away on the exclusive Via Tornabuoni.

But Ferragamo didn't stop there. They went on to buy The Continentale (near the Ponte Vecchio), the Lungarno Suites just across the river Arno, the Hotel Lungarno (the first to open in 1995) and the Palazzo Capponi, two-suite, fully staffed apartment of a family-owned palace. Two more properties--the Villa Le Rose and the Lungarno Apartments--offer guests a non-traditional hotel experience in that the places have a more residential feel.

Yet for Ferragamo their Florence hotels are more of a business investment than a design project. In fact the designer of the Gallery Art Hotel is Christian Liagire, who designed the Mercer in New York. And apart from the Ferragamo catalogs scattered about the hotel lobbies and Ferrragamo products here and there, the fashion house presence is relatively quiet. So no logo-branding here.

However, we suspect with big names designers like Armani, Versace and even Ralph Lauren getting in on the hotel game, this could change. And already, the company is branching out to Tuscany and Rome later this year.

HotelChatter

Select a Destination:

Tags: Fashion Hotels / → All Tags