Standing at the centre of Cortina d'Ampezzo with the Tofane massif rising behind it, the cream-rendered palazzo that houses the Grand Hotel Savoia has anchored the town's social geography since 1912, when Cortina was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The five-storey Liberty-style building — green-shuttered windows trailing flower boxes, rusticated stone quoins at the corners, a zinc mansard roof punctuated by dormer windows — carries exactly the grandeur you would expect of a grand hotel built for the Belle Époque skiing elite. The more arresting architectural move is the angular extension added to the right flank of the original structure: clad in warm-toned local stone and angled like a geological fault line, it announces itself as unambiguously contemporary without disrupting the ensemble. Inside, the renovation replaced inherited Alpine kitsch with something considerably more assured. Wide-plank oak floors run through the lobby, where a coffered timber ceiling in pale blond wood spans the full length of the room and deep cobalt velvet sofas anchor a loose arrangement of seating punctuated by contemporary artworks. The same bleached-oak vocabulary continues into the guestrooms, where leather-strapped headboards, exposed timber beam detailing, and black-and-white ski photography give the rooms an atmosphere closer to a well-edited mountain residence than a conventional hotel interior. In the bar, warm walnut panelling meets stacked-stone feature walls and terracotta velvet chairs under a grid of illuminated timber coffers — a palette that manages to feel rooted in the Dolomites without leaning on the usual folkloric shorthand.

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