That Ferragamo style: From shoes to hotels

Beyond its sumptuously designed shops all over the world, Salvatore Ferragamo, the sleek and sophisticated fashion brand based in Italy, is a hotel specialist as well. The Lungarno Alberghi Spa is a hotel management company, headed by Salvatore Ferragamo of Florence. Lungarno Hotels is the chain’s trademark representing innovative Hotellerie projects.

This is Ferragamo’s way of transferring consistently into the hotel industry the style and top quality standards distinctive of the Ferragamo products all over the world, so explains Leonardo Ferragamo, president of Lungarno Alberghi Spa, assisted in operational activities by Fabrizio Gaggio as managing director.

The Lungarno Hotel’s mission is to build a new personalized model for the cosmopolitan guest who loves a relaxed welcoming style and higher quality.

There are three hotels now managed by Lungarno Alberghi Spa, located in Florence. First is the Gallery Hotel Art, the most significant "design hotel" project in Italy, inaugurated in May 1999 with space set aside for a future laboratory and meeting place for events and programs linked to contemporary arts. Then there is Hotel Lungarno, completely renewed in November 1997, with its own restaurant in a unique setting, directly overlooking the Arno River, and just a few steps away from the Ponte Vecchio. The third is the Hotel Continental, located between Por Santa Maria, the heart of the city, and Ponte Vecchio, from the windows and terraces of which Florentine history and culture can be contemplated, with views looking on the Vasarian corridor and Boboli Gardens.

The Hotel Lungarno has, for over 30 years, been a unique "home away from home" preferred by celebrities like the Johnson family during the years of the United States presidency, Jean Paul Sartre and Marino Marini. Overlooking the Arno River between Ponte Vecchio and Ponte S. Trinita, Hotel Lungarno has 69 rooms including 12 suites in a blend of natural elegance, comfortable luxury and calm tranquility. From the large glass door, like a framed masterpiece, the Ponte Vecchio and surrounding buildings overlooking the embankment along the Arno River can be admired, while the terraces on the Arno River become theatrical stages under the stars displaying the spectacular view of the heart of Florence.

The interior of the hotel, inspired by nuova classicita, displays a masterful balance of light tapestries and blue-purple carpeted floors, with emphasis on details that recall the elegance of Italian homes. Antique furniture, an important collection of paintings from the 1940s to the ’60s decorating the halls and the lobby where a precious Picasso hangs over the fireplace, emphasize this unique atmosphere made of a skillful blend of past and future.

Details include silver trays of Florentine specialties and walls decorated with contemporary paintings or with Botticino-flowered marble tiles, and nickel faucets in the bathrooms. Even from a technological point of view the rooms are conceived as the "study" in a private house: modem and fax lines in every room, electronically controlled facilities (lights, air conditioning, heat) and personalization of keys without having to use a magnetic card.

The Hotel Lungarno, indeed, is just one of the many proofs that Salvatore Ferragamo knows elegance, style and living the life.