Hotel Romeo Roma by Zaha Hadid Architects

Location: Rome, ItalyType: HotelYear: 2024Architect: Zaha Hadid ArchitectsPhotographer: Chris Dalton, Jacopo Spilimbergo

Hotel Romeo Roma by Zaha Hadid Architects in Rome

Hotel Romeo Roma is a 74-room five-star hotel that Zaha Hadid Architects created inside Palazzo Capponi, a 16th-century palazzo on Via di Ripetta in Rome, a few steps from Piazza del Popolo. Hadid joined the project in 2015, a year before her death, and her practice completed it under project director Paola Cattarin; after about a decade the hotel opened in December 2024. Behind the sober Renaissance facade, flowing vaults of Makassar ebony, marble and brass meet restored frescoes and Roman ruins, in one of the last projects to carry Hadid’s name.

Vaulted white entrance passage of Hotel Romeo Roma lined with marble, a canopy of curved metal ribs overhead and inlaid lines sweeping across the dark stone floor towards the street gate

From Palazzo Capponi to a Romeo hotel

Alfredo Romeo, the Neapolitan founder of the Romeo Collection, whose first hotel opened in Naples in 2008, bought the palazzo in 2012. Built for the Serroberti-Capponi family, it later housed the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and from 1951 it was the office of INAIL, the state workers’ compensation institute, which added two wings in the 1950s and remodelled much of the interior. Its 17th-century frescoes, painted on canvas, had been taken down, reframed and painted over; painstaking restoration uncovered them again. Romeo Design began working with ZHA in 2015, choosing its free forms over the sameness of hotel interiors elsewhere.

Bedroom at Hotel Romeo Roma under an ornate painted coffered ceiling, restored frescoes lit along the walls above a curved white bed platform on a dark ebony floor

A new interpretation of Roman vaults

The design starts at the ceilings. Rome can be read as a palimpsest of Baroque over Renaissance over medieval over Roman, crowned by painted vaults, and Hadid always lifted her buildings into the air. For Cattarin, the city’s history can be read in its 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.” Because the palazzo’s walls rarely meet square, the intersecting vaults stretch and distort, producing what the architects call “moments of wonder”. In the reception, an ebony desk sits beneath a golden vault of some 2,500 fibreglass scales.

Golden scale-clad vaults flowing down into a column at the Hotel Romeo Roma reception, with an ebony desk, black chairs and white marble walls beyond

Reception, courtyard lobby and restaurants

ZHA re-established a processional sequence from the street to the guest rooms. From reception, guests pass into the former courtyard, now vaulted with a retractable glass roof, which serves as the lobby; from there the restored grand stairways lead up to the rooms and out to the garden. A marble bust of Livia Drusilla, wife of the emperor Augustus, found during the works, stands near contemporary art by Francesco Clemente, Mario Schifano, Mimmo Paladino and Christian Leperino. In Il Ristorante Alain Ducasse, tree-like columns branch into reflective ribbed canopies, the bistro is lined with undulating ebony arches, and the cigar lounge is wrapped in polished wood.

Wide view of the Alain Ducasse restaurant at Hotel Romeo Roma, silver tree-like ceiling ribs spreading from dark columns over white-clothed tables and the open kitchen behind

Seventy-four rooms as worlds of their own

Rather than repeating one modular room, the palazzo’s irregular plan led to an individual design for each of the 74 rooms and suites, which ZHA describes as “worlds of their own”. Walls fold, ceilings swell and furniture grows out of the floor in Carrara Statuarietto and Nero Marquina marble, Makassar ebony, cedar, chestnut and Krion by Porcelanosa, chosen partly for acoustics and temperature control. Because the listed walls could not be cut for services, each room has a second skin over a cavity a few centimetres wide that hides the services. Suites on the piano nobile keep their restored frescoes, and upper-floor suites have private terraces with city views.

Hotel Romeo Roma guest room with sculpted Makassar ebony walls that swell and fold around the bed, a white ceiling and a pale rug on the dark striped floor

A Roman workshop beneath the pool

Rome’s deeper layers surfaced too. Early excavations for the garden hit a Roman wall, halting work on site, and hand excavation supervised by the Soprintendenza revealed a previously undocumented bottega, or workshop, faced in diamond-patterned opus reticulatum about 2,000 years ago. A 90-square-metre gallery was carved some four metres below the garden to protect it, and its glazed ceiling doubles as the transparent floor of the hotel’s swimming pool. The Sisley Paris spa around it, about 1,000 square metres, is finished in Sicilian rock salt, tadelakt plaster, cedar and ash.

Underground archaeological gallery at Hotel Romeo Roma, Roman brick and opus reticulatum walls and stone remains lit beneath the curved glass floor of the garden pool

Completion and credits

Forty-nine companies took part in the restoration, which required 230 applications for building permission, all overseen by the Soprintendenza because the palazzo is a national historic monument. The design is credited to Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, with project architects Fulvio Wirz and Mariagrazia Lanza, structural engineering by Studio Beta, services by Spring, lighting by Corte Gherardi and construction by Mannelli Costruzioni and Ga.Re.Co. In 2025 the hotel was named a Prix Versailles laureate among the world’s most beautiful hotels. The photography is by Chris Dalton and Jacopo Spilimbergo.