Luca Guadagnino’s Latest Is a Big Screen–Worthy Palazzo

Luca Guadagnino has long been known for his singularly evocative movies: Suspiria, Challengers, and Call Me By Your Name only scratch the surface. A transportive sense of place is a Guadagnino signature on the big screen: a viewer can practically smell the apricot blossoms under the Lombardy skies of Call Me By Your Name from the comfort of their sofa. So it came as little surprise when, in 2017, the filmmaker and producer launched Studio Luca Guadagnino, a design studio through which he sought opportunities to work “on a space that has nothing to do with my practice as a filmmaker,” he said at the time, “where I have to create a space for dimensional storytelling.”

A Milan Design Week installation at the hands of Guadagnino’s studio soon followed, and so too did a breathtaking Venetian villa. Now, the filmmaker has recast a portion of Rome’s 16th-century Collegio Nazareno as Palazzo Talìa. Guadagnino’s studio designed the common areas and singular suite of the 26-room boutique hotel, which channels the distinctly Italian splendor of the founder’s past cohort of private residences and retail projects. While Find Me, the erstwhile Call Me By Your Name sequel, was ill-fated on many accounts, we could picture Elio brooding over an amaro at the hotel’s aptly named Bar Della Musa.

The designer imbued the ancient collegio with a wash of color, texture, and a touch of the unexpected: down one interior arcade, botanic carpets by the architect Nigel Peake add color and whimsy, and in the bar, lava stone tables and a Murano glass-mirrored wall create an appropriately cinematic ambiance. “If you come to Rome, a hotel like this, you want to diffuse yourself in beauty, comfort and softness,” Guadagnino tells the Financial Times about the project. “Everything needed to exude that pleasure.”