Rome, Italy
Rome is an epicenter of architecture and history. This reputation of architectural history is evident through the vast layers of its buildings. From Baroque to Renaissance to medieval, structure upon structure holds the evidence of the talented architects and artists that came before them. When Alfredo Romeo, founder of Romeo Hotels, acquired the Palazzo Capponi, he knew it would take an expert team to honor the building’s long history. He turned to Zaha Hadid Architects to complete the hotel’s historical remodel.
Located on the Via di Ripetta, a branch of Rome’s Sistine Trident, the Palazzo Capponi was previously the home of Italy’s National Institute for Assistance of Accidents at Work. These prior tenants had heavily modernized and remodeled the palazzo, adding two additional wings and painting over the building’s original frescoes. These 17th-century frescoes had been painted on canvas, removed from their original location and placed in wall frames. “Painstaking restoration gradually uncovered and revealed these delicate works and four centuries after their creation, they can be admired once again by guests of the hotel,” says Zaha Hadid Architects.
The collaboration between Romeo Design and ZHA began in 2015, creating original designs, rather than repeating or resembling common designs from other hotels, served as a key aspect of the project. Romeo explains this further, “We are transforming a period building with avant-garde designs by Zaha Hadid. It’s a remarkable dialogue between contemporary and historic architecture.”
An example of the hotel’s originality is the inspiration taken from Roman ceiling vaults. Paola Cattarin, from Zaha Hadid Architects, says that the city's architectural history can be traced through Rome’s masonry vaults. “We took inspiration from this idea, to make a new interpretation of vaults and their intersections. All the different rooms, down to the furniture, are designed with this concept,” she says. Roman vaults differ in size and shape, the most basic being a barrel vault formed by a single curve extending along a certain distance. If you put two barrel vaults together, by connecting their right angles, you get a groin vault, which can become distorted if the meeting points are not equidistant or squared.
The Hotel Romeo Roma holds 74 rooms and suites, each with their own special twists and turns. ZHA expertly utilizes distorting shapes and lines to elevate the space’s architecture from top to bottom. The guest rooms and suites contain materials ranging from Carrara Statuarietto and Nero Marquina marble, Makassar ebony, cedar and chestnut woods, as well as Krion engineered by Porcelenosa. Suites on the piano nobile, or principal floor, are designed to incorporate the now-restored 17th-century frescoes.
Continuing its theme of preserving Roman history, during the creation of the hotel garden an early excavation unveiled a Roman wall that halted work on the site. Archaeological surveys uncovered a bottega, or workshop, containing opus reticulatum, a diamond-shaped stone facing applied almost 2,000 years prior. A 90-square-meter gallery was then dug into the ground below the hotel’s garden to preserve the site. To further protect the bottega, a glazed ceiling was placed above it to serve as both the floor of the hotel pool and as a gallery to allow guests visual entry into the city’s extensive history.
