Room Mate Luca Redefines Florentine Charm With Bold Velvet Interiors
Room Mate Luca sits in the historic heart of Florence, Italy, shaped by interior designer Luis Garcia Fraile as a contemporary counterpoint to its neoclassical shell. The boutique hotel combines custom wallpapers, velvet textures, and polished brass with modern comfort to welcome guests a short walk from the city’s major cultural landmarks. Each room and shared area turns Florentine energy into a tactile, urban hospitality experience.
Light filters down the narrow Florentine street and catches on polished brass inside the entry. Guests step from the stone sidewalk into patterned color and quiet, conditioned air.
Set within a neoclassical palazzo, Room Mate Luca is a boutique hotel in the center of Florence where interiors by Luis Garcia Fraile build a bridge between period character and contemporary comfort. The project, completed after a full restyling in 2024 with LGF Spaces and BRB Engineering, turns 55 guest rooms and shared lounges into a cohesive visual journey. Every corridor and room reads as part of a single narrative driven by surface, color, and touch.
This hotel sits steps from major Renaissance landmarks, yet its atmosphere leans toward vibrant urban hospitality rather than historical pastiche. Custom wallpapers, velvet upholstery, and precise brass detailing establish a consistent palette that threads through guest rooms, circulation, and common areas. The result is not a museum to the past but a present-day interior where visitors can rest, work, and prepare to meet the city outside.
Layering Color And Pattern
Throughout the hotel, walls carry bespoke wallpapers that respond to scale: bolder rhythms in corridors and public areas, more intimate motifs in the rooms. Each surface choice links back to Florence’s artistic vitality, translating that energy into graphic compositions rather than literal references. Vivid tones meet calmer backgrounds so guests read depth without visual noise. Short walks between lobby, lift, and room become a sequence of framed views, each held together by recurring hues.
Velvet, Brass, And Comfort
Velvet appears on headboards, seating, and panels, giving a tactile softness that absorbs sound and tempers the building’s hard shell. Polished brass lines lamps, handles, and small details, catching light and marking points of contact guests reach for throughout the day. The material trio is clear: tailored upholstery for comfort, metal for precision, and patterned surfaces for visual rhythm. Together they create rooms that feel composed yet easy to inhabit after long days in the city.
Guest Rooms In Dialogue
Each of the 55 guestrooms is air-conditioned and equipped with Wi-Fi, minibar, digital TV, and safe, so daily routines unfold without friction. Materials and color palettes in these rooms echo the surrounding urban landscape, translating stone, terracotta, and city light into textiles and finishes. Beds anchor the composition, with headboards and wall treatments framing the sleeping area as a calm core. Around them, seating, storage, and small work surfaces support both short city breaks and longer stays.
Shared Areas And City Connection
Beyond the private rooms, shared lounges and reception areas extend the interior language and encourage guests to linger. Free connectivity underpins these zones, allowing travelers to plan museum visits, map walking routes, or catch up on work without leaving the hotel. Staff at reception guide visitors toward Florence’s cultural highlights, so the building becomes a practical starting point for exploration. Interiors frame this hospitality with consistent textures and tones, keeping the experience cohesive from entry to elevator landing.
As day turns to evening, light softens on the neoclassical façade while brass details and patterned walls continue to glow inside. Guests return from the city’s galleries to rooms that still echo Florence, but through color, fabric, and scale rather than replicas. In that balance between historic structure and renewed interior character, Room Mate Luca finds its quiet rhythm.
Photography courtesy of Luis Garcia Fraile
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