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Don't Wear a Skirt On The Gray Hotel's Crazy Floating Stairs

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  Site Where: Via San Raffaele 6, Milan, Italy, Italy, 20121

November 14, 2008 at 11:55 AM | 3 Comments

Contemporist featured a few shots of the 21-room Gray Hotel in Milan, designed by Florence architect Guido Ciompi, that totally turned us on. All 21 of the hotel's guestrooms are unique and, if you ask us, pretty stunning — we do love us some design hotels.

But a photo of a particular feature caught our eye. Behold: the famed floating stairs (which have been making the rounds on the Internet this week) in one of the rooms.

As always, we have several questions: do we see a handrail? We're clumsy and, well, we know we wouldn't make it up these stairs without some sort of an incident. Second: as a Contemporist commenter so eloquently pointed out, "Not to be prudish, but couldn’t someone sitting at the bar/table see up m’lady’s skirt?" Um, so true — though we're pretty sure this is a guestroom and not a public bar so it may be less of an issue. Thank goodness.

While the rooms are awesome to look at, the price tag is a little steep (an average of about $763) and we couldn't help but wonder whether we were better off gazing at photos of the place rather than actually staying in a room. We headed over to TripAdvisor to investigate — and it turns out, if many of these reviews are to be believed, we should probably just save our money.

A TripAdvisor Member said:

it was calm, cool, chiq [sic] and dark. However, it was a little too 'cool', the room was very small (no plasma tv or Stark bath in a 300 euro/night room) the bathroom was very compact and the shower leaked badly (the hydro shower was very ineffective).

And Lucyluu said the design was just a little over-the-top:

Room looks fancy but it just a bit a irritating (curtains close with a slow electric button; I'm capable of closing my own curtains. Also don't need a big leaf in my sink and wish the subtle lighting actually allowed me to see what I was doing).

Alright, so we'll just sit here and look at photographs. Remember, hotel design friends: your rooms can be all sorts of crazy and fashionable, but they've gotta be functional too.

3 Comments

  1. juliana

    HotelChatter
    November 14, 2008 at 11:57 AM




    yet another hotel room...

    that i should definitely NOT get drunk in. either that or make sure i leave a pillow and a blankie at the bottom of the stairs before i go out on the town.

  1. Jenna

    HotelChatter Editor
    November 14, 2008 at 12:20 PM




    body box

    I wonder if you can stick your torso through the big stair up top there and pretend you're flying

  1. JeremyDesignHotels

    HotelChatter Member
    November 18, 2008 at 8:56 AM




    Great Hotel

    Despite the Tripadvisor comment about the negative aspects of the hotel, it is definitely one of my favorites in Milan!  

    On that note, if any readers have great images of Milan (or any other destination with a Design Hotels Member), upload it to our flickr account for the chance to win comp nights and books!

    http://www.flickr.com/groups/designhotelscontest/

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