Portrait Firenze

Fashion hotels can be a mixed bag, but not the Lungarno Collection; each one of the Ferragamo fashion brand’s boutique hotels is impeccably stylish, faultlessly luxurious, as perfectly measured and finely crafted as a pair of Ferragamo loafers. In fact, if you’ve stayed in one (a Lungarno hotel, that is — it’s hard to sleep in a Ferragamo loafer), you will have moved on to the Portrait Firenze’s “select a room” page by now.

For the uninitiated: the latest Lungarno Collection hotel to open in Florence, the Portrait Firenze is absolutely true to form, its thirty-six rooms and suites designed by the celebrated Michele Bönan, here inspired by the haute couture of the Fifties, as well as Florence’s aristocratic history. The rooms are extraordinary, as you’d expect, and the design is almost impossibly elegant — modern yet steeped in history, lavish but never gaudy. Everything, from the furniture to the linens to the bath products, is top quality, Italian-made, and all selected with utmost attention to the ensemble. You’d expect nothing less from a proper fashion house.

The aristocratic concept goes beyond the furniture and design, of course — the service here is everything you’d want: discreet, ever-present, and highly capable. There’s a dedicated electronics wrangler for any technology issues, and in Caffé Dell’Oro, the Italian osteria, there’s not a napkin out of order. The location is impossible to fault as well, right on the banks of the Arno, in plain view of the Ponte Vecchio; but banish any thoughts of the bridge’s famous crowds. From inside the Portrait Firenze you’d never know they were there.