Palazzo Talìa in Rome is the director’s first foray into designing a hotel through his interior-architecture practice Studio Luca Guadagnino Fans of the Italian film director and producer Luca Guadagnino know his oeuvre to be lush with design elements: from “Call Me By Your Name”’s idyllic countryside setting to “Suspiria”’s hair-raising moody interiors. Guadagnino’s latest project, however, is more real than fiction: a 16th-century collegio in Rome’s Rione di Trevi turned luxury 26-room boutique hotel called Palazzo Talìa. Unbeknownst to some of his fans, Guadagnino established an interior-architecture studio in Milan in 2017.
The eponymous studio specializes in contemporary mid-century Italian design. Among his design work, he lists a Lake Cuomo home replete with color, Aesop stores in Rome and London, and a retail space in New York. For Palazzo Talìa, the Oscar-nominated director designed all public-facing spaces from the sitting rooms and verdant courtyard to the restaurant and subterranean spa, plus the hotel’s signature suite.
This is his first foray into hospitality. Every detail begs the guests to touch them, something Guadagnino welcomes and even encourages. “Tactility and materiality are everything,” studio designer and hotel project lead Pablo Molezún said in an interview .
“Every surface and item is conceived with material three-dimensionality. This, and how the lines of the ground floor envelop you—they are what make the experi.