Hotel Straf

The Straf is one of the new breed of high-design hotels to have recently opened in downtown Milan. The city that this hotel inhabits is less the dingy industrial center of decades past, and more the new Milan, the center of all things stylish in Italy. In this case, the architect, Vincenzo de Cotiis, is also a fashion designer — who better to know what the haute couture set wants from a hotel.

The exterior is vintage 19th-century, but de Cotiis’s interiors, in concrete and black slate with scratched mirrors and gauzed glass, are utterly modern. Don’t expect spacious rooms with expansive views; these are more like stylish prison cells, or panic rooms to which harried fashionistas retreat in order to shut out the outside world. The rooms, however well-appointed with flat-screen satellite TVs and high-speed internet, are not meant to be lounged in at great length — most guests will prefer to pass time in the stylish Bar Straf, perhaps playing spot-the-celebrity, lounging in the massage chairs in the chromotherapy or aromatherapy rooms, or working out in the 24-hour gym (an oddity for this sort of hotel, but certainly nothing to complain about). And though the hotel does serve dinner, there is no restaurant; this alone means one cannot hole up here for long.

Which is entirely the point. No tourist trap, this is a place for busy professionals, or at least furious shoppers. This district, the Golden Quadrangle, is home to the best of the city’s already-impressive boutiques; Dolce and Gabbana and Prada’s shops are just around the corner. And fashion isn’t everything, even in Milan — the Duomo Cathedral, the Galleria and La Scala are all mere steps from the hotel.