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Tags: Florence Hotels / Hotel Openings / Apartment Hotels / Town House Hotels / → All Tags

The Palazzo Vecchietti Hotel Now Open in Florence

Where: Via degli Strozzi 4 , Florence, Florence, Italy, 50123

The Town House brand is a totally swanky range of apartment-style accommodations that is spreading across Italy. They started out in Milan and Turin and are now just opening the Town House Palazzo Vecchietti in central Florence, and this latest one certainly sounds like it's living up to the quality of the others.

The Palazzo Vecchietti is actually twelve separate apartments built into a fifteenth-century palace in a no-expense-spared kind of way. Each apartment is named after an Italian "great", with the largest one being the Leonardo da Vinci. They've got their own kitchenettes and there are mod cons including WiFi, and every room is kitted out to fit the part of belonging to a palce.

This Florence version of the Town House is actually a franchise of the original Milan brand, with three families joining forces to get the palace up to standard, and that suggests we might start to see more of this luxury-style accommodation across Italy.

Well, we might see it, but can we afford to see inside it? The funny this is that the prices at the Milan Town Houses are not too bad (promotion rates range from €120 - €200, or $160 - $270) so even though we can't book the Florence version yet, we're optimistic that it might be vaguely affordable. We'll wait and see.

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"Staying Cool" is Getting Easy To Do in the UK

Where: Rotunda, Birmingham, United Kingdom

We're not quite sure if we could book ourselves into accommodation called Staying Cool but we admire the gall of people who could.

The Staying Cool moniker belongs to a group of serviced apartments in Birmingham, Manchester, Devon and Barcelona, and they strive to be, as you'd imagine, pretty darn cool. In their own words, Staying Cool apartments are:

the hip alternative to a hotel ... kitted out with bespoke pieces from some of the hottest UK designers, serviced to meet all your needs but with the independence and individuality (no two are the same) of your own wow apartment.

The Birmingham Staying Cool at Rotunda property has just been given the first five-star rating in the whole city after opening up in May this year. So if you want five-stars in Birmingham, for now you'll have to check into Staying Cool.

Their rates start at £129 (US$230) a night, with rates starting from just £110 (US$200) at other properties. So apparently being cool doesn't have to cost you everything. But we still don't want to tell our friends "We're staying at Staying Cool".

Tags: Lisbon Hotel Scene / Apartment Hotels / Historic Hotels / Monica Guy / → All Tags

Lisbon Hotel Guide :: Eden VIP Aparthotel, A Pretty Face

Where: Praça dos Restauradores 24, Lisbon, Portugal, 1250-187

One of the few hotels in Lisbon you'll catch tourist taking photographs of - the Eden VIP Aparthotel has the most spectacular art deco façade and most visitors think it's some kind of palace.

The 4-star hotel's stone gallery filled with tumbling leafy gardens used to front the Eden theatre before the building was converted by the VIP Hotels group. The conversion was so good the hotel was award several prizes by the Portuguese government.

And to top it all off, it has the most excellent location right in busy Restauradores square, in downtown Lisbon.

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HotelChatter Questions :: Travelodge or Goldsborough Apartments in Sydney?

HotelChatter Questions: In which, the intrepid HotelChatter editors and our hotel maven readers answer hotel questions that pop into our inbox. Have a question for us? Send it along. Think you have a better answer than we gave, or better yet, want to give a vote of confidence to our answer? Comment away.

We love to be here to help, and HotelChatter reader Jamie has a quandary: where to stay in Sydney? He's trying to choose between the Travelodge Sydney or the Oaks Goldsborough Apartments and says: "We're most concerned about location!"

The Travelodge is on Wentworth Avenue, really close to the true downtown center of Sydney, while the Goldsborough Apartments are on Pyrmont Street on Darling Harbour, a similar distance from the center of Sydney but with a chance of a harbor view.

Both places are relatively cheap for downtown hotels (and the quality tends to match--not that there's anything wrong with either of them, but they're clearly not luxury hotels).

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