Best design hotels in Rome

Jean Nouvel spent six years on three older buildings joined by the Arch of Janus, the oldest part 17th century, and chose to finish as little as possible. The old plaster flakes, the floor tiles are battered and the concrete is bare, on purpose. Everything new is a stainless steel volume, a small building of its own, that opens to reveal a kitchen, a bathroom or a wardrobe, and two internal light shafts, which the foundation calls the courtyards of the sun and the moon, run through the block.

There are 24 apartments, each with a full kitchen, and depending on the flat the windows look onto the Arch of Janus, San Giorgio al Velabro or the Palatine. You come in past the Fondazione Alda Fendi's gallery, free every day from 11am to 7pm, and Raffaele Curi's fibreglass rhinoceros, which gave the building its name, now lives indoors, in the gallery or on the roof as the shows change.

Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel converted all seven floors of a rationalist block that Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo built from 1936 to 1938, and made it read as marble rather than office. You enter through a circular vestibule past a colossal bust of Jupiter Serapis, lent by the Torlonia collection, and the ground-floor library is shelved in Franco Albini's 1956 Cassina bookcases and stocked with books about Rome. Four colour palettes run through most room categories, with bathrooms in coloured marble and mosaic roundels let into the walls.

The detail carries it: 110 gold-dusted Murano twirls by Barovier and Toso on the Bvlgari Bar's black marble counter, a roof laid out as a Roman villa garden with an opus spicatum floor and more than 200 enamel pots, and in the spa a Bisazza mosaic pool among eight marble-clad columns. Outside, Francesco Cellini rebuilt the square in front of the Mausoleum of Augustus for pedestrians in 2025.

Patricia Urquiola's studio did the interiors of an 18th-century cardinals' palazzo that shares a wall with San Marcello al Corso, and the restoration, done under the heritage superintendency, saved the protected façade, the marble staircase that climbs under a skylight and columns in the hall some 600 years old. The new work speaks Roman: walls in travertine and cocciopesto, the old plaster of crushed brick and lime.

The ground floor is one open run from lobby to restaurant to planted courtyard, tied together by a green marble counter that carries on outside, and a fourth-century baptismal bath lies under glass in its floor. Upstairs, the bathhouse is the set piece: travertine carved with laurel leaves in relief, above a Palladiana floor set with green Cipollino marble.

The design here is about framing one view. The house is a small early 17th-century palazzo designed by Giovanni Battista Mola and later remodelled as a hunting lodge, with Cicero's motto on the loggia at the top. Next door, Matteo Thun wrapped the Grand View residence of 2018 in an orthogonal mesh of travertine, with interiors by Giorgia Dennerlein, and The Court, the walled courtyard between the two buildings, stays open to the Colosseum on its fourth side.

From the Master Room the amphitheatre and the Ludus Magnus fill the window, and the shower is turned towards them; in the Grand View Suite Colosseo it is a bath. Breakfast is on the roof terrace, enclosed and covered in winter, with the Colosseum in front of you.