At Hotel Trame, a new boutique hotel in Rome’s Sant’Eustachio district, Valeriano Boragina designs the bed as a piece of architecture rather than a fixture — a freestanding, multi-function island instead of a headboard against the wall. The Rome-based architect handled the 760-square-metre main floor of a historic palazzo on Via Monterone, in the Sant’Eustachio district, restoring its coffered ceilings and plaster mouldings before introducing furniture built to stand independently within the original room volumes. The approach treats preservation and new function as compatible rather than competing demands.
The restoration phase came first: decorated wooden coffered ceilings, plaster mouldings and historic window frames were uncovered, restored and highlighted through targeted lighting, with lost elements faithfully reconstructed using original moulds. Nothing in the room layout was allowed to compete with this recovered fabric until it was fully legible again — a restraint shared by other recent Rome conversions, including Henry Timi’s monastery-to-hotel project at Nomos. Only then did the Gallotti&Radice furnishing program begin.
Bathrooms sit lower than the rest of each room, a deliberate step down that the project uses to mark where the intervention begins. Clad in contemporary materials, these volumes are legible against the historic shell rather than hidden inside it. It’s a strategy that reads as confidence in the original architecture rather than deference to it.
Material choices carry the project’s central dialogue between eras: lime plasters in Rome’s characteristic warm tones, oak parquet laid in Italian herringbone parquet, and Roman travertine in the bathrooms and bespoke details. Steel and glass, by contrast, define the toilet volumes, producing reflections that temper their contemporary presence inside the historic rooms. Warm and cold registers are kept in constant contact rather than zoned apart.
Each of the 13 rooms — one 80-square-metre suite, four junior suites, four deluxe rooms and four standard rooms — has a unique floor plan, a consequence of adapting a period building rather than a design choice on its own. Boragina’s response was to treat beds and sofas as furnishing islands, autonomous elements placed within the space rather than built into it. “Right from the very first three-dimensional renderings, the understated elegance, formal purity and material quality of the collection’s furnishings naturally responded to the need to create a harmonious bridge between the building’s history and its new purpose,” said the architect in a statement.
The bespoke freestanding bed, developed by Gallotti&Radice to Boragina’s design, is the clearest expression of that logic. Available in three versions, it folds a bedside surface, a luggage area and a reading seat into a single object, standing in for furniture the room’s irregular plan can’t otherwise accommodate. It becomes less a bed than the room’s organizing device.
A wider furniture selection completes the interiors: the Sensei console by Tollgard + Castellani, the enveloping Stami Lounge armchair and Selce side tables by Studiopepe, the Bolle Stelo lamps by Massimo Castagna, and the modular Dama side tables by Studio G&R. Each piece is positioned as a standalone architectural object rather than a backdrop, continuing the room’s logic of furniture that holds its own against a historic shell.
A separate 90-square-metre space at No. 73 Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, overlooking Largo di Torre Argentina, extends the project as Slow café, a café and patisserie with views onto the archaeological complex opposite. A custom communal table paired with G&R’s 0419 stools anchors the main room, while a second room under a cross vault holds bespoke tables and G&R’s 0414 chairs. The café functions as the project’s public face, open to a street the hotel itself doesn’t front.
The round room, a table with seating built directly into it, is pitched as a stand-in for a Roman piazza. On a 640-square-metre floor holding 13 rooms, giving up guest-room space for one shared table is a specific bet on shared ritual over private square footage — a trade the material provided doesn’t fully make the case for.
Hotel Trame by Valeriano Boragina Architettura e Design | Location: Via Monterone, Rione Sant’Eustachio, Rome — Key materials: lime plaster, oak herringbone parquet, Roman travertine, steel, glass