08/10/2026
Italy you’ve done it again. Add Orient Express La Minerva Hotel to the most impressive hotel debuts in recent memory. The first-ever Orient Express hotel and debut hotel project by 35 year old wunderkind HUGO TORO is an objective home run. Toro spent years studying Rome before working on the hotel, and to our eye, it looks like he borrowed heavily from the color palette of the Pantheon (warm stone, deep reds, ochres and all those earthy Roman tones), which sits a block away.
The lobby bar has a legitimate case for best hotel lobby bar anywhere on planet earth. It’s glamorous but not stiff, theatrical but not over-designed. Exactly the kind of room you want to lounge in for hours. Most impressive, though, is how dialed the hotel already feels. The service is exceptional, unsurprising in some sense as they’ve assembled a team with veterans from some of Rome’s most legendary hotels, including Hotel de Russie. For a hotel this new, however, there are remarkably few (zero?) rough edges.
Congrats to *everyone* at the OELM team for crafting a beautiful experience across every detail imaginable. Bravi! 🇮🇹
