Director Luca Guadagnino’s filmography contains multitudes, including projects about tennis players, cannibals and witches. His next film will adapt William S. Burroughs’s cult novel Queer — but that isn’t the only project Guadagnino has in the works. What’s more, another high-profile project of his involves a discipline very different from the one by which Guadagnino first made his mark. But if you happen to stay at Rome’s Palazzo Talia and get a sense of a familiar aesthetic throughout the hotel, there’s a very good reason for that.
As Dezeen’s Tirthika Shah writes, this luxury hotel represents Studio Luca Guadagnino’s first foray into hospitality. In 2018, T Magazine‘s Guy Trebay chronicled the filmmaker’s initial design work, which involved collaborating with architect Giulio Ghirardi on converting a onetime silk factory into a house.
Even then, Guadagnino emphasized the overlap between his creative outlets. “I’m a storyteller. That’s my first job,” he told T Magazine.
In the case of Palazzo Talia, the studio’s tasks included finding a balance between modern amenities and the history of the building, which dates back to the 16th century, and which contains frescoes that have endured over the centuries. Pablo Molezun, the studio’s project manager, told Dezeen of the challenges of “pondering how to intervene in a place so steeped in history.”
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Get ready for the Killshot resurgenceGuadagnino’s studio formally debuted at Milan Design Week 2022. There, the studio shared designs for a pair of living rooms, complete with furniture. As Sleek’s Nayeun Kim wrote of the Milan show, “There’s no denying Guadagnino’s film background, the thoughtfully positioned furniture and lighting naturally guiding the viewer through the room in a cinematic experience.”
It isn’t hard to see how evoking the cinematic in a space dedicated to hospitality would be a plus. Hopefully for the guests at Palazzo Talia, the experience of living life in a movie will fall on the sumptuous side of things.
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