Architect: Studio Italo Rota, Milano, Italy 
Location: Milano, Italy

That the Boscolo Exedra, the seventh five-star hotel in the flamboyant Boscolo chain, looks so different from any other hotel is no accident. Italian architect Italo Rota is well known for his exuberant architecture and interior design, such as the colour-changing house he created for fashion designer Roberto Cavalli in Florence. 
As with the chain’s other six hotels, creating the Boscolo Exedra involved the renovation of an existing building. Here is was an eight-storey former bank, built in the Twenties in Milan’s Corso Matteotti. 

With Rota in charge, the layout of the Boscolo Exedra was never going to be conventional, and the decision to hide the reception desk away on the lower ground floor, rather than placing it by the entrance, was deliberate. 
This public space is lit by a ‘smart lighting’ system comprising more than 4,000 LEDs of various colours, which automatically change colour and intensity. 

Recesses in the ceiling containing LED lights arranged in a ‘molecular pattern’ run through the reception area and into the ‘museum hall’, an area used to display art. 

The largest of the three restaurants continues the black scheme of the museum hall. A long, gently curving wall has eight bay windows, which provide intimate seating areas. The area around each window is panelled with mirror-coated steel which graduates to shiny black, and perforated and lit by LEDs. The windows themselves are laminated with graphics of trees and plants. The floor is polished wood panelling with a bold, striped grain. The scenic lighting of the hotel’s restaurant and lobby is obtained with a mix of white cold light LEDs, white warm LEDs and blue LEDs with a customized diffuser made of white satin PVC. The appliances are supported by an imposing customized domotic dimmering system, which controls 25 different luminous scenes.

Technical info: PVC Barrisol membrane
Picture credits: Beppe Raso