Magna Pars L'Hotel À Parfum

Milan’s hotel scene is a place where hospitality and retail go comfortably hand in hand. There are hotels owned by fashion houses, by jewelers, and even one hotel that’s literally located inside a high-end mall. So Magna Pars L’Hotel À Parfum, a gleaming all-suite hotel on Via Forcella, is not without precedent: it’s owned by Milan’s Martone family of perfumers. For most of the past century the building was the family’s “essences factory,” but like Milan itself, it’s gotten quite a facelift since its industrial days. Encased in glass and flooded with light, furnished by forward-thinking designers and contemporary Milanese artisans, it looks every bit the live-in design showroom that it pretty much is, perfectly at home in a neighborhood defined by its design studios, architecture firms and fashion houses. During Milan’s Design Week there may be no better place to stay, though the fact is that at Magna Pars L’Hotel À Parfum it feels a bit like Design Week all year round.

The hoteliers do well to apply the olfactory theme with a light touch. Suites are named after fragrant flowers and plants (gardenia, jasmine, sandalwood) and there are occasional, well-placed visual reminders (an image of a wind-swept lavender field on the wall of the restaurant), but no one is getting spritzed with samples as they walk down the halls. In fact there’s plenty of room to breathe. The suites start out industrial-scale massive and only get bigger as you go up the scale, and they’re made to feel still airier by their views of the hotel’s courtyard garden and all the immaculate white décor. They’re high-tech, as well, everything from the curtains to the temperature controlled from a single panel.

The food at the restaurant, in fine Italian fashion, is lower-tech, with an emphasis on flavors from Piemonte and traditional preparations — though the space, just off the garden, is polished and modern, inspired by a stylish present-day Milanese apartment. A not-so-secret secret bar behind a beautiful copper door made by students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera is a haven within a haven, its white onyx counter somehow glowing even brighter than the rest of the hotel. And the whole operation is powered by solar and geothermic energy, which is just a fancy way of saying you can live large here without leaving an environmental footprint to match.