Andrea Branzi's timber-slatted 1980s modernist building, sitting alongside a restored Ricasoli family palazzo from the sixteenth century, gives The Hoxton, Florence one of the more architecturally improbable premises in contemporary European hospitality. Branzi, a co-founder of the Memphis Group whose work helped define Italian design's most irreverent decade, built the newer structure with the same speculative intelligence he brought to his theoretical projects. The older building carries its own considerable weight: original frescoes dating to 1611, a vaulted arcade, and the bones of late-Renaissance domestic architecture translated into 161 rooms spread across both structures. AIME Studios, Ennismore's in-house design team, wisely declined to smooth the two buildings into a single aesthetic. The public spaces lean into warm amber and terracotta — glazed column tiles, crimson velvet barrel chairs, mahogany-stained bentwood, wine library shelving floor to ceiling — with the amber glow of Murano-style chandeliers setting the bar's mood closer to a cultured Florentine apartment than a hotel lobby. Guest rooms shift to sage-green walls and terracotta-orange headboards with scalloped silhouettes, parquet underfoot, and ikat-weave curtains admitting pale Tuscan light. The vaulted loggia, dressed with terracotta pavers, stone columns, and potted olive trees, is where the palazzo's Renaissance structure speaks most plainly, the striped bistro chairs the only concession to contemporary ease. It is a genuinely unusual building combination, handled with enough restraint to let the history remain legible.

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