Hotel Romeo Roma by Zaha Hadid Architects Transforms Historical Palazzo
Hotel Romeo Roma, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, has opened in the Italian capital. Situated at Palazzo Capponi on the Via di Ripetta, the building was converted into a hotel from a historic palazzo, which dates back to the 16th century. The studio aimed to create contemporary interiors featuring vaulted ceilings and three-dimensional forms that contrast with the building’s Renaissance exterior.

Situated at Palazzo Capponi on the Via di Ripetta, the hotel conversion forms part of the Sistine Trident, roads that form a three-pronged main street at the centre of Rome.

ZHA converted the palazzo to a 74-room hotel that contains spaces with three-dimensional forms, vaulted ceilings and curved walls, a nod to Baroque architecture in the city.
As well as 70 guest rooms, ZHA added four larger suites on the first floor that retain original frescoes discovered in the building.

The lobby, which is decorated with pink and green veined marble, features a glass roof with a series of intersecting ribs that ZHA based on vaulted ceilings found in other Roman buildings.
“The classical interpretation of Rome as a palimpsest of architectural layers – Baroque buildings atop Renaissance and medieval structures, themselves atop their Roman predecessors – includes a final layer of verticality: ceilings of painted trompe l’oeil (fools the eye) arches, heavenly vaults and celestial chambers populated with ascendant saints, martyrs and putti,” said ZHA.

The hotel bar takes its cues from traditional 1920s American bars, which have a series of rooms that can be separated with frosted glass windows and are lined with dark timber.
“With American bars as a shared reference, the bar’s design features precise, bespoke woodworking crafted from darker timbers,” said ZHA.
“A series of freestanding walls with translucent glazing employed to create small, intimate rooms for groups of patrons – as found in many of Rome’s culinary institutions.”

Between the garden and the Roman Gallery, the architects added a spa and swimming pool, with a glass ceiling that also functions as the pool’s floor.

Instead, the studio worked with archaeologists to come up with a way to include the wall – following the discovery of a Roman workshop known as a bottega thought to date back to 2000 years ago, during the excavation process.





Photography by Chris Dalton
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