Kant: the beautiful vs the sublime

In his Critique of Judgement (1790), Immanuel Kant draws a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.

The beautiful concerns form. It is bounded, harmonious, restful. It reconciles us with the world.

The sublime, by contrast, begins where form breaks down: the storm at sea, the mountain range, the starry sky, the mathematically infinite.
These do not please us; they overwhelm us. Our senses cannot fully take in what stands before us. For a brief moment, we experience our own smallness.

Yet paradoxically, this experience elevates us.

Why? Because although nature exceeds our senses, we discover something in ourselves that exceeds nature: reason, the capacity to think the infinite even when we cannot picture it.

The sublime humiliates the senses and exalts the mind.

Schopenhauer: art as an escape from suffering

Arthur Schopenhauer begins from a much darker premise.

In The World as Will and Representation (1818), reality itself is the problem. Beneath every appearance lies the Will: a blind, aimless, insatiable striving that manifests in everything from gravity to hunger to love. To exist is to want, and to want is to suffer. Satisfaction is momentary; the pendulum swings between pain and boredom.

If suffering originates in desire, can we ever become free?

Schopenhauer proposes three paths.

One is ethics, through compassion. By recognising ourselves in others, we loosen the grip of selfish desire.

Another is asceticism, the radical denial of worldly wants. Saints and monks embody this path, attempting to extinguish desire altogether.

Then there is a third path, perhaps the most accessible of all. Art.

In aesthetic contemplation, the subject stops willing. We cease to be an individual with appetites and become, in his phrase, the pure, will-less subject of knowing.

For Schopenhauer, specifically music stands above all the other arts, because it is a direct copy of the Will itself.

Nietzsche: between Apollo and Dionysus

For Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Greek tragedy revealed the deepest truth about existence because it united two opposing forces:

The Apollonian – order, reason, proportion, clarity.
The Dionysian – instinct, ecstasy, chaos, transformation.

Neither alone suffices. Pure Apollo is an illusion of harmony; pure Dionysus is annihilation. For Nietzsche, this tension is life itself.

This idea feels surprisingly contemporary.

Take Cy Twombly: loops that whirl with genuinely Dionysian violence, gesture on the edge of formlessness, and yet held, barely, by an Apollonian intelligence of composition.

So... will art save us?

Through beauty and the sublime, we measure ourselves against the infinite and discover a mind that exceeds its own senses. Through contemplation, we suspend the machinery of wanting and glimpse what it feels like to simply know. Through the tragic, we look directly at chaos and give it a form we can bear.

Art, in other words, is how human nature exercises itself: how it transcends, how it rests, how it affirms. Art and beauty keeps us human, and being fully human may be the only salvation on offer.

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The most interesting thing about Costa Smeralda is that it was never designed by hoteliers. It was designed by dreamers.

1. Hotel Cala di Volpe (Jacques Couëlle)

Everything starts here. Cala di Volpe was the first hotel built on the Costa Smeralda, opened in 1962. Designed by Jacques Couëlle, the hotel remains one of the purest expressions of the Costa Smeralda dream. Corridors twist unexpectedly, walls curve like waves and every corner seems designed to frame the sea. Nothing is rigid, symmetrical or predictable. The lobby remains one of the great interiors of the Mediterranean.

2. Porto Rafael (Rafael Neville)

Before there was an Aga Khan, there was a count who had a dream. Rafael Neville, Conte di Berlanga, son of a Spanish filmmaker friend of Picasso, claimed he saw the whole place in a vision: a bay, seven islands, a little piazzetta, a few white houses. He bought his first piece of land in 1960, two years before the Aga Khan’s consortium even existed, and built it stone by stone with the help of a local builder everyone called Dumè. His motto, painted on a plaque that still stands in the village, was sognare è vivere, to dream is to live. Michele Busiri Vici designed much of the architecture, including the tiny chapel of Santa Rita. Every August, for the Count's birthday, the village dressed in white and gathered in the piazzetta to celebrate.

3. Private Villas (Alberto Ponis)

A young Genoese architect named Alberto Ponis moved to Sardinia in 1963, and over the following decades he designed more than two hundred houses around Punta Sardegna, Porto Rafael, and Costa Paradiso, each one sited with an almost obsessive attention to the exact contours of its rock. Many of his villas remain almost invisible from the road, absorbed into the landscape and deliberately difficult to access.

4. Jungle Surf

Jungle Surf is the cool kids surf shop of Palau and Porto Pollo, run by the same family for more than thirty years out of a small storefront in the area. Part surf community, part creative gathering point, Jungle Surf represents a different side of Sardinia. Far removed from the polished image typically associated with Costa Smeralda, it attracts photographers, designers, surfers and free spirits who gravitate toward a more understated lifestyle. Its symbol, a whale’s tail, comes from a story the family tells about togetherness: whales swimming close enough to touch their baby whales. It is a small, unglamorous, deeply loved institution built by people who simply loved the sea.

5. Ritual Club

In 1968, a gem trader from Parma named Andres Fiore bought a granite hillside above Baja Sardinia sight unseen, drawn by rumors of a cave hidden within it. He camped there for a week, sleeping among the rocks, and decided it would become his life’s only architectural work. He never called it architecture, but a scenografia, a stage set. What he built is a spiral carved directly into the mountain, where niches and staircases seem aligned with the stars, and a DJ booth now sits at the center of the space.

6. Villa La Grotta (Jacques Couëlle)

On the rocky spur of Monte Mannu, Jacques Couëlle carved out a house for himself and his wife, quite literally, into the granite itself. Curved doorways, asymmetric hand-glazed tiles, a bedroom window shaped to suggest a face if you look at it the right way. Couëlle was a friend of both Picasso and Dalí and was once described, fairly, as an architect-sculptor. His son Savin later inherited both the family eye and the family commissions, and much of Porto Cervo’s most distinctive private architecture carries the Couëlle name in one form or another.

7. Romazzino, A Belmond Hotel (Michele Busiri Vici)

Romazzino opened in 1965, designed by Michele Busiri Vici with his son Giancarlo, white curves rising from the sand like something Gaudí might have done if Gaudí had built on a beach. Grace Kelly stayed here. So did Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot. Since 2024, the hotel has become part of the Belmond portfolio and retains much of its original charm.

8. Porto Rotondo (Cascella & Ceroli)

Porto Rotondo is what happens when two Venetian counts decide a holiday village should also be an open-air museum. Founded in 1964 by brothers Luigi and Nicolò Donà dalle Rose, the village still centres on a piazza named San Marco, a deliberate, slightly nostalgic nod to the family’s home city. Andrea Cascella and Mario Ceroli shaped much of Porto Rotondo’s identity, from the piazzetta to the Chiesa di San Lorenzo and a series of sculptural details woven into the village.

9. Pietro Terzini at Poltu Quatu

Costa Smeralda has always evolved by absorbing contemporary cultural references. Poltu Quatu means hidden port in Gallurese dialect, and for most of its life it lived up to the name. This year, artist Pietro Terzini has brought his signature text-based interventions, introducing a distinctly contemporary voice into one of the area’s most picturesque settings. His works create moments of irony and reflection within a landscape often associated with glamour. Terzini’s language feels digital and current, while the surrounding architecture remains rooted in the Mediterranean imagination of the 1960s.

10. Phi Beach

Phi Beach sits on a cliff in front of a historic fortress in Baja Sardinia. Over the season, it hosts internationally acclaimed DJs, but the real draw is sunset hour, when the entire structure seems to dissolve into the light. Very few venues in Europe offer this kind of dialogue between architecture and atmosphere after dark.

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1. Bourse du Commerce — Pinault Collection

In 2021, François Pinault opened his Paris collection inside a building masterfully adapted by Tadao Ando. A monumental concrete cylinder now sits within the eighteenth-century Bourse du Commerce, creating one of the most compelling architectural dialogues in the city. The exhibitions are consistently excellent, but the building itself is the real masterpiece. It remains my favourite museum stop in Paris.

2. Fondation Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton is one of the most extraordinary buildings in Paris. Its glass sails seem to float, appearing almost different from every angle. Inside, Bernard Arnault’s collection sits alongside a temporary programme that consistently delivers major international exhibitions. One of the most influential cultural institutions in the world.

3. Ojii & Bar Omi

Ojii sits discreetly behind a black lacquered door and delivers one of the most beautiful dining rooms in Paris. Gold-leaf details by Jenna Kaes, acid-etched mirrors and deep red lacquered walls create an atmosphere somewhere between a film set and a private residence.

Its younger sibling, Bar Omi, near Place Vendôme, offers sushi and wine in an intimate 1980s-inspired interior designed by Fanny Perrier.

4. Hôtel Costes

Hôtel Costes is as much a mood as it is a hotel. Jacques Garcia’s interiors, from crimson velvet and dark woods to heavy drapery and softly lit courtyards, have defined a certain vision of Parisian glamour for decades. The remarkable thing is that it still works. It feels timeless precisely because it was never trying to be contemporary. The courtyard remains one of the great people-watching spots in Paris.

5. Sainte-Chapelle

Everyone queues for Notre-Dame. Yet just around the corner lies Sainte-Chapelle. Built by Louis IX in the thirteenth century to house the Crown of Thorns, the chapel contains fifteen towering stained-glass windows that make the entire interior glow from within, like the inside of a jewel. One of the most extraordinary spaces in Paris.

6. Institut Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti spent more than forty years working in the same modest Montparnasse studio, even as he became one of the defining artists of the twentieth century. The Institut Giacometti offers something increasingly rare: an intimate encounter with an artist’s world. Sculptures, drawings, archival materials and reconstructions of the studio create a deeply personal experience, far removed from the scale of a major museum.

7. Gallery Hopping — Le Marais & the 8th Arr.

Two of my favourite gallery districts are Le Marais and the 8th arrondissement.

In Le Marais, you’ll find Perrotin, Thaddaeus Ropac and a dense concentration of contemporary galleries, often tucked inside beautiful hôtels particuliers. The 8th arrondissement, particularly around Avenue Matignon, offers a more established ecosystem of blue-chip galleries, auction houses and secondary-market specialists.

8. Mamiche

Mamiche belongs to that category of Paris institutions dedicated to doing simple things exceptionally well. The croissants are among the city’s best, the pain au chocolat is worth the queue. There is no better way to start a day in Paris.

9. Hôtel Massé

Hôtel Massé feels like a collaborative artwork. The founders invited artists, architects and craftspeople to contribute individual elements. Christian Rosa canvases, vintage lighting, burgundy corridors, okoumé wood and 1970s carpets create a space that feels collected rather than designed.

10. Silencio

Designed by David Lynch, Silencio feels exactly how one might expect a David Lynch nightclub to feel: cinematic, mysterious and slightly surreal. Gold surfaces, unexpected materials and dimly lit corners create the impression that something interesting is either about to happen or has just happened. Still one of the city’s most enduring late-night addresses.

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1. Fondation Maeght

Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence may be the finest small art foundation in the world. Opened in 1964 by dealer couple Aimé and Marguerite Maeght and designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert, it sits in the hills above the village and feels like the landscape and the art have always been the same thing. The Giacometti courtyard, the Miró labyrinth, the Braque mosaic pool and chapel, Calder mobiles turning in the pine-scented air: it feels like a dream.

2. La Colombe d’Or

The story of La Colombe d’Or is simple and almost too good to be true. The Roux family, who have run this inn in Saint-Paul-de-Vence since the 1920s, once accepted paintings in lieu of payment from artists who couldn’t afford their bill. The artists in question included Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Miró, and Calder. The paintings are still there, hanging on the walls of the restaurant and the bar, next to which you will eat your lunch. The iconic pool is one of the most photographed on the Riviera.

3. Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

Béatrice de Rothschild built her rose-pink villa on the narrowest point of the Cap Ferrat peninsula between 1905 and 1912, and she did not do it quietly. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild contains one of the most significant private art collections assembled in the Belle Époque period. Outside, nine gardens (French, Florentine, Spanish, Japanese, Provençal) are laid out across the hillside. It is eccentric, obsessive, and… pink!

4. Villa Santo Sospir

In 1950, Jean Cocteau was invited by his patron Francine Weisweiller to stay at her villa on Cap Ferrat. Unable to leave a surface undecorated, he covered the walls, ceilings, and fireplaces of Villa Santo Sospir with murals drawn directly onto the plaster in a total environment he called “the tattooed villa.” It hosted many iconic visitors, including Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder. Romy Schneider and Alain Delon spent their first romantic weekend here. The villa will soon open again after a thoughtful restoration.

5. Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc

Nothing on the Côte d’Azur commands the same place in the collective imagination as Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Perched on the legendary Cap d’Antibes since 1870, it has welcomed everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, alongside generations of the world’s most celebrated and affluent figures. Its iconic tennis court, tucked among fragrant Mediterranean gardens, is as storied as the hotel itself. More than a Riviera landmark, Eden-Roc remains the benchmark against which every luxury hotel on the coast is measured and, more than a century and a half later, it still sets the standard.

6. Château La Coste

Just outside Aix-en-Provence, Château La Coste is the rare place where world-class contemporary art, architecture, and winemaking exist in perfect harmony. Conceived by a visionary collector, the estate has become an open-air museum shaped by some of the most influential creative minds of our time, including Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Ufan. As you wander through vineyards, olive groves, and fields of lavender, monumental artworks and architectural interventions emerge unexpectedly from the landscape. More than a winery, Château La Coste is a journey through art, architecture, and nature, where every turn reveals a new dialogue between culture and landscape.

7. Le Palais Bulles

Pierre Cardin bought an unfinished experiment in organic architecture above Théoule-sur-Mer in the 1990s and turned it into one of the most extraordinary private residences in existence. Le Palais Bulles was designed by Hungarian architect Antti Lovag in the 1970s with no straight lines, no right angles, only interconnected spherical rooms carved into the cliff face above the sea. Cardin hosted fashion shows here for decades. It is now used for events and opens occasionally for visits, worth planning around.

8. La Chapelle Matisse

Henri Matisse called the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence his masterpiece, which is a significant claim from an artist of his stature. Built between 1948 and 1951 as a gift to the Dominican sisters who had nursed him during a serious illness, he designed everything: the acid-yellow, emerald-green, and cobalt-blue stained glass windows, the black-line ceramic tile murals of St. Dominic and the Virgin and Child, the vestments, the altar. Matisse was 80 when it was completed and considered it the culmination of a life’s work.

9. Villa Kérylos

Théodore Reinach was a classical scholar, archaeologist, and member of one of France’s great intellectual dynasties, and between 1902 and 1908 he built himself an ancient Greek house on the rocky promontory of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, designed by architect Emmanuel Pontremoli and furnished entirely to period. Reinach lived in it seasonally for the rest of his life, wearing a tunic and adopting Greek customs indoors. The result is one of the strangest and most beautiful interiors on the Riviera: mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a marble bath fed by the sea, every room opening onto light and water.

10. Château de la Messardière

Saint-Tropez in season is an exercise in sensory overload, and Château de la Messardière is where you go when you want to be above it, literally. The 19th-century neo-Gothic château sits on a hilltop with views over the bay and the town below. The pool is the thing — perched on the hillside with the bay stretched out below it, the kind of view that makes you forget you were ever anywhere else. The art collection throughout the property is considered, the terrace at sunset, the bay turning gold and the Maures hills behind, is the image you came to the South of France to find.

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Capri is the extension of that energy, but sun-drenched, cinematic, slower, where everything becomes a frame.

1. Villa San Michele

Built by Swedish physician Axel Munthe on the ruins of an ancient Roman villa, Villa San Michele feels like a dream translated into architecture. Perched high above Capri in Anacapri, everything there seems suspended between sky and sea. It is truly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

2. Concettina ai Tre Santi

Concettina ai Tre Santi carries the energy of a family institution while still attracting a younger crowd interested in food as culture.

The pizzas taste amazing, but the point is really the atmosphere. There’s warmth everywhere, no stiffness, no performance. Just people fully enjoying life around a table, which is perhaps the most Neapolitan thing possible.

3. Plan X Capri

Capri has always attracted artists, collectors and beautiful people orbiting somewhere between leisure and culture, and Plan X feels like a contemporary continuation of that tradition.

The space brings a younger, international energy to the island’s cultural scene, balancing the polished glamour Capri is known for with something more experimental and current. During summer especially, exhibitions, conversations and openings blur naturally into aperitivos and dinners nearby.

4. Punta Tragara

The walk toward Punta Tragara is part of the experience itself. Quiet villas hidden behind gates, white walls reflecting sunlight, bursts of bougainvillea everywhere. Then suddenly the view opens completely onto the Faraglioni.

At the end of the path sits the iconic hotel originally designed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s. Go close to sunset, when the entire landscape softens into red tones.

5. Grand Hotel Quisisana

The Quisisana is a social institution of Capri. Since the nineteenth century it has attracted aristocrats, artists, actors and people who prefer their luxury slightly understated. The tennis courts hold onto that atmosphere, framed by some of the most beautiful views on the island. A very specific kind of European elegance still survives here.

6. Buonocore

Every island has its ritual stop, and in Capri it’s Buonocore. The icecream cones are still handmade on the spot throughout the day.

There’s usually a queue, but nobody seems impatient about it. The experience is simple in theory: gelato, warm cone, walking through Capri. Despite all its glamour, the island is ultimately best enjoyed through small pleasures done extremely well.

7. Chiostri di Santa Chiara

Few places capture the emotional contrast of Naples quite like the Chiostri di Santa Chiara. The cloister was rebuilt after World War II and remains one of the most beautiful examples of Neapolitan decorative art. The painted ceramic benches and columns depict pastoral scenes that feel almost dreamlike compared to the intensity outside the monastery walls.

8. Cicciotto a Marechiaro

Marechiaro has long represented the more poetic side of Naples, close to Posillipo, and Cicciotto captures that atmosphere perfectly. Tables sit directly above the water, fishing boats drift nearby, and lunch stretches naturally into late afternoon.

The seafood, the pasta, the view: everything about the experience suggests that Naples has been perfecting this particular combination for a very long time.

9. Gallerie d’Italia

Located inside Palazzo Piacentini on Via Toledo, Gallerie d’Italia hosts part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s corporate collection, one of Italy’s most significant examples of corporate patronage and cultural investment.

The Naples location balances historical collections with ambitious contemporary programming, creating an interesting tension between classical Italian grandeur and present-day cultural discourse. Marble staircases, monumental proportions and restrained design choices give the space a sense of intellectual and artistic refinement.

10. Teatro di San Carlo

Teatro di San Carlo is the oldest continuously operating opera house in the world, opened in 1737, and somehow it still feels emotionally overwhelming when you enter.

Opera matters in Naples in a very real way. Even if you don’t attend a performance, the building itself embodies the city’s relationship to emotion, spectacle and beauty: just unapologetic magnificence.

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Over the last decade, luxury has progressively shifted away from pure ownership and toward participation. The wealthy consumer of 2026 is not simply buying a watch, a handbag or a painting. They are buying access, communities and experiences that signal belonging to an increasingly global network of taste.

Tennis courts, golf clubs and padel matches have become the new social salons of wealth. None of this is accidental. And none of it is really about sport.

Just as collecting art evolved beyond aesthetics into a form of social capital, participation in certain sports increasingly functions as an entry point into high-value communities. The rise of experiential luxury accelerated this transformation. Younger affluent consumers appear more attracted to experiences that combine health, exclusivity and social proximity.

This partly explains why so many fashion houses and watchmakers are gravitating toward sports culture. Tennis and golf naturally embody the qualities modern luxury seeks to project: discipline, elegance, internationalism, wellness and controlled exclusivity.

The aesthetic dimension matters too. The visual language of tennis whites, country clubs, padel courts and golf resorts has become deeply intertwined with contemporary luxury branding. What once represented traditional elite leisure now fuels moodboards, campaigns and social media strategies targeting a new generation of globally mobile consumers.

Increasingly, luxury is about signaling access to the right spaces, routines and people. In this context, the line between social platform, luxury experience and networking infrastructure becomes increasingly blurred.

The watchmakers moved first and most intelligently. Rolex has been at Wimbledon and Roland Garros for so long that the association feels geological.

Audemars Piguet took a different approach. Padel is the right sport for this moment: technically accessible enough that the barrier is social rather than athletic, growing fast enough to feel like a genuine cultural shift, and associated with a demographic (urban, affluent, international) that AP has spent years cultivating through the Royal Oak. The racket is the brand’s logic, expressed as sporting equipment.

Richard Mille’s golf balls and Patek Philippe’s course accessories operate on similar principles. The sport object functions as a proof of presence.

All of the above are a legitimacy transfer mechanism, discretely packaged as a collector’s item.

Fashion houses come to this from a different angle. They already have the infrastructure for object-making. What these collaborations ultimately purchase is the symbolic capital and credibility carried by the sport itself.

The Gucci tennis capsule is the clearest example using tennis as an aesthetic register.

Louis Vuitton’s passport holder extends the logic further into travel, which is where these sports actually live.

The car brands are the most unexpected entrants.

For Porsche, the golf bag is a natural extension of a decades-long approach to precision-driven lifestyle design.

The Lamborghini x Babolat padel racket is the opposite. It is spectacular and deliberately so. Lamborghini does not do restraint and it says exactly what it means to say: that the brand lives wherever adrenaline is adjacent.

None of these brands needed these objects commercially. The margins on a branded golf bag or a limited-edition tennis ball are not the argument. The argument is presence in a social context that advertising cannot fully penetrate. Sport is one of the last arenas where community forms through doing rather than consuming, and luxury brands have understood that the most efficient entry point is to be legible in its native language where the object is a credential.

There is a second function worth naming. These objects are, almost without exception, priced well below the brand’s core product universe. A Patek Philippe watch averages around €50,000. A set of Patek Philippe golf balls does not. A Lamborghini starts at €200,000 whereas the racket is attainable. This is deliberate. The sport object operates as a collectible: a lower-threshold entry point that extends brand presence into the life of a consumer who admires the house but has not yet arrived at its core price point. It is a social object as much as a luxury one, something to be given, displayed, photographed, discussed. The Rolex tennis ball on a desk communicates things in the same vocabulary as the watch on the wrist, at a fraction of the cost and with considerably more conversation value. So the brands are not cheapening themselves.

The sport collaboration is not a product extension. It is a bid for residency in that ecosystem. And as luxury increasingly shifts from ownership to participation, the value of that residency will only increase. Perhaps this is where luxury is ultimately heading: a space where aesthetics, wellness, networking and identity merge into one seamless experience.

A note on something I am building

I started building MotiMatch, a curated social sports app for tennis, padel and golf players — backed by the Tech Europe Foundation (Bocconi University and Politecnico di Milano). The premise follows directly from everything above: the internationally mobile, aesthetically literate, professionally active 25-to-40-year-old who expands their social life through sport. The brands described above have identified this person with considerable precision. We are building the infrastructure they are actually moving through.

The modern urban consumer wants to find the right people to play with. MotiMatch aims to facilitate real-world connection around these sports matching you with the right people, on the right courts, in the right cities.

We held our first event in Milan in April. More to follow. If you play tennis, padel or golf and you are reading this, follow along on Instagram @moti.match launching in May 2026 !!

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1. Gran Priorato di Roma — keyhole

A tiny keyhole with one of the most perfectly framed views in the world. Peek through and you’ll see the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica aligned between sculpted hedges, a composition so intentional it feels almost too good to be true. Located on the Aventine Hill, one of the dreamiest corners of Rome, the atmosphere feels almost suspended in time. Go early or during lunch break, the line forms quickly.

Nearby bonus: stroll around the entire Aventine area which is full of quiet elegance, umbrella pines and hidden villas.

2. Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana

The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, known colloquially as the Colosseo Quadrato, is one of the most stunning pieces of rationalist architecture in existence. Built during the Fascist era, it was intended to celebrate Italian civilisation for the 1942 World’s Fair that never happened. Fendi chose it as their global headquarters in 2015, which does something interesting to the building’s already layered symbolism.
Worth making the trip to EUR around sunset for the aesthetics alone.

3. Hotel de Russie — Rocco Forte Hotel

The unofficial headquarters of chic Rome. The Rocco Forte property sits just off Piazza del Popolo and has been the preferred address for people of a certain sensibility. Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau (who called the place “paradise on earth”) were regular guests there, alongside dancers and composers such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky, who now have suites named after them. The terraced garden at Le Jardin de Russie, layered, lush, slightly hidden, is designed by Olga Polizzi. The art collection throughout the property is understated and genuinely considered.

4. Conciliazione 5 — George Rouy

One of the most interesting contemporary activations in Rome right now. Located in Via della Conciliazione 5, steps from St. Peter’s, the work is visible from the street twenty-four hours a day. Opened in 2025 for the Jubilee and run by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, its 2026 programme takes reading as its subject. Currently on view one of the hottest British contemporary artists: Presence in Form by George Rouy is a large-scale painting whose distorted figures feel both sensual and slightly unsettling.

5. MAXXI — Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo

Designed by Zaha Hadid, MAXXI is worth visiting for the building alone. Fluid concrete lines, dramatic staircases and light cutting through the interiors make it feel almost like moving through a sculpture. The museum focuses on contemporary art and architecture and attracts a younger, more international creative crowd.

6. Orient Express La Minerva

Orient Express La Minerva is the first hotel the brand has ever opened which, given that the train has existed since 1883, makes it an event worth noting. The interiors reference Italian craftsmanship at every turn, and the rooftop offers one of the more surreal views in the city, including the dome of the Pantheon.

7. Musei Vaticani — Galleria delle Carte Geografiche

On the way to the Sistine Chapel there is one of the most extraordinary rooms in the world (and my fav): the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche. A long corridor covered in luminous topographical frescoes of Italy with an absurdly beautiful green-and-gold ceiling. It feels almost unreal in person.

The Sistine Chapel is, obviously, the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted the ceiling and the famous The Last Judgment between 1508 and 1512, commissioned by Pope Julius II. The chapel is also the site of the papal conclave, where the pope gets chosen.

8. Villa Medici + Giuseppe Penone, Foglie di pietra

Villa Medici is the Accademia di Francia a Roma, perched on the Pincian Hill above the Spanish Steps, whose gardens alone justify the visit with views over the city that make everything else feel very small. Fendi has long been among the institution’s closest supporters, a patronage relationship that has produced some of the most interesting programming in Rome’s cultural calendar.

On the way there, a piece that often goes unnoticed is Foglie di pietra by Giuseppe Penone, one of the defining voices of Arte Povera: two towering bronze tree forms holding enormous marble boulders suspended, seemingly impossibly, within their branches. Installed near Palazzo Fendi in Largo Goldoni, the work was commissioned by the maison that has long supported contemporary art in Rome.

9. La Matriciana 1870

Because cool kids into art also need pasta. La Matriciana is one of Rome’s classic institutions for proper cucina romana, opened in 1870 and still doing exactly what it set out to do. The bucatini all’amatriciana is the point, and so is their millefoglie, available only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The old-school interiors match the vibe perfectly.

10. Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola

Baroque maximalism at its peak. The church is famous for its illusionistic ceiling frescoes by Andrea Pozzo, but lately it’s also become known for the mirror installation that lets visitors photograph the ceiling perfectly reflected above them. Expect a queue, it’s visually worth it.

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Here are the ones that stayed with me long after the carpet ended.

Emma Chamberlain — becoming the canvas itself

Emma Chamberlain’s Mugler look felt less like a dress and more like a painting that had somehow learned to move.

What made it interesting wasn’t only the obvious Van Gogh-esque brushstroke effect. The gown was reportedly hand-painted over 40 hours and inspired by Emma’s childhood growing up around her father’s watercolor and oil paintings.

Louisa Jacobson — Joan of Arc reimagined through couture

Louisa Jacobson (Meryl Streep’s daughter) understood the assignment. Her look leaned into one of history’s most mythologized female figures, the warrior saint immortalized for centuries through paintings, tapestries, and sculpture: Joan of Arc.

The metallic detailing and structured silhouette captured the tension of femininity versus strength, sanctity versus rebellion.

This is my fav one!

Mona Patel — the Leonardo da Vinci fantasy

Dolce & Gabbana conceived Mona Patel’s look as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci.

The outer cape resembled a floating manuscript covered in sketches, notes, and references to the Vitruvian Man. Underneath, the gown explored anatomy through pleated chiffon mimicking muscles and fascia.

Leonardo studied bodies the same way couturiers study silhouettes.
Both are obsessed with structure, movement, proportion, illusion.

That’s why couture can feel almost architectural at its best.

Eileen Gu — the future of couture

Eileen Gu’s Iris van Herpen look may have been the clearest example of fashion becoming actual installation art.

The dress reportedly contained over 15,000 glass bubbles and required more than 2,500 hours of craftsmanship, but the truly surreal detail was the hidden technology embedded underneath that produced floating bubbles around her body as she moved.

It felt like contemporary immersive art: part sculpture, part science experiment, part dream sequence.

Hailey Bieber — the color that makes history

Hailey Bieber arrived in a custom Saint Laurent dress.

The solid 24-karat gold breastplate was reportedly moulded directly from her own body, referencing Yves Saint Laurent’s 1969 collaboration with sculptor Claude Lalanne, who pioneered these surreal metallic torso pieces decades ago.

But the blue is what stays with you. Jacques Majorelle, the French Orientalist painter, developed that specific shade in 1937, using it to paint his villa in Marrakech, a colour so vivid it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Yves Saint Laurent later purchased and restored that villa, incorporating what became known as Majorelle blue into his own collections.

Rachel Zegler — the blindfold that was never decorative

Rachel Zegler wore a Prabal Gurung design finished with a delicate strip of gauze across her eyes. The look was inspired by Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, which depicts the sixteen-year-old queen being guided toward the block after ruling England for nine days before Mary I claimed the throne.

Alex Consani — Botticelli’s garden, remade

Alex Consani made history as the first trans woman to co-chair the Met Gala. She hit the carpet in a Gucci gown and white faille cape by Demna, reportedly inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera. Then, in a dramatic moment, she removed the cape to reveal a sheer nude bustier paired with a skirt and train covered in black feathers.

Obsessed with her hair style.

Gracie Abrams — a Klimt in motion

Gracie Abrams wore a gold Chanel gown directly inspired by Gustav Klimt’s gold-leaf period — The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. His figures are barely distinguishable from their backgrounds; the decorative and the human collapse into each other.

Klimt’s women aren’t dated because they were never entirely in time. They exist in that golden suspension where beauty tips into myth.

Fashion is art when it carries a reference beyond itself, when it means something to the person wearing it, and something again to the person looking.

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1. The Row

The entrance to The Row’s Mayfair flagship greets visitors with a Turrell piece, illuminating the space with its slowly changing light display. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who collaborated with architect Annabelle Selldorf on the space, incorporated unique pieces throughout the entire store from an Isamu Noguchi sculpture to a John Chamberlain crushed-car piece and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand.

2. The Red Room at The Connaught

A hidden jewel for late-night drinks. The Louise Bourgeois central piece make it feel closer to a collector’s private salon than a hotel bar. When hotelier Paddy McKillen described his vision to Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ long-time assistant, Gorovoy brought up the painting packaged for another exhibition from a basement, and McKillen purchased it on the spot. Alongside it: Bourgeois’ scarlet hologram from 1998 and works by Jenny Holzer, Ti-a Thuy Nguyen, and Trina McKillen. The room is almost entirely a space for female visionaries.

3. Mount St. Restaurant

Part of the Hauser & Wirth universe, this is where British cuisine and the London art, fashion, and collector crowd casually overlap. Rashid Johnson’s floor commission Broken Floor is a palladiana mosaic of different marbles that visitors can explore, stand on, and physically interact with. Over 200 works feature throughout: Warhol, Matisse, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston. Even King Charles has eaten here, choosing the main public room over the private dining. You’ll understand why when you’re sitting beneath a Freud at lunch.

4. Abuelo

One of the chicest coffee stops in London. The name means grandfather in Spanish, and the room is built on that logic: large communal tables, interiors that reference the 1970s are designed and built on site without trying too hard, filled with the kind of creative crowd that somehow always looks effortlessly cool. Great coffee and matcha.

5. Tate Modern

The Rothko Room is one of the most well-known displays in Tate Modern and the nine Seagram Murals that hang there were never originally meant for a museum at all. Rothko was commissioned to paint them for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, the most prestigious public commission ever awarded to an abstract expressionist, but came to believe a fashionable restaurant was not the right home for such work, and withdrew. He gave them to the Tate instead.

6. Lagana

Lagana takes its name from a Greek flatbread, and the whole restaurant is built around that spirit, generous, loose, made for sharing. With paper tablecloths and crayons left on the tables so everyone can draw throughout dinner, the whole restaurant somehow turns into a collective sketchbook by the end of the night.

7. Adret

Iykyk. There is almost no information to be found on their website. No e-commerce. No Instagram feed of product shots. The analogue approach is entirely the point. Everything is handmade in Indonesia and only available in-store. Adret is a menswear label founded by Adam Rogers, who designed for Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label, and Seto Adiputra, who was the editorial director of a leading menswear publication in Southeast Asia and is also the brand’s photographer, known for his unhurried visual language. Together they travel between London and the Indonesian mountains, working side-by-side with local artisans. The store on Clifford Street is the physical expression of everything they believe: somewhere between a collector’s apartment, a gallery, and a dream.

8. Maison Assouline

More than a bookstore, a lifestyle fantasy for people obsessed with art, fashion, photography, and beautiful objects. Hidden behind the shelves is the Swans Bar, serving cocktails, wine, and snacks. It feels like old-world intellectual glamour.

9. Gallery Hopping in Mayfair

Start around Cork Street and wander through Pace, Almine Rech, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Thaddaeus Ropac and more. The beauty of London is that the galleries are embedded into the rhythm of the city, you move from museum-quality exhibitions straight into cafés, restaurants, and auction houses within minutes.

Bonus point: attend an auction. Even just sitting in the room at Sotheby’s or Christie’s during an evening sale is one of the coolest experiences in the art world. The viewing days before a sale are open to anyone, you can stand within inches of works that will sell for millions.

10. Réalisation Par

Réalisation Par has one of the most quietly seductive boutiques in London. The brand built its following entirely through the quality of its silks and a very specific fantasy of how a woman might dress, and the store translates that same logic into a physical space: warm, chic, and effortlessly pretty. The pieces almost sell themselves once you're inside. And then there's the iconic photo-booth :)

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Indeed, much of the concern that surrounds copying, imitation, and delegation in the art world seems to rely on the figure of the artist as a solitary genius, singularly responsible for both the conception and the execution of the work. While this figure has become central to how we evaluate artistic legitimacy, it does not accurately reflect how art has been produced for most of its history.

If one considers the structure of Renaissance workshops, the distance between our current expectations and historical reality becomes immediately apparent. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci did not operate in isolation, but rather within highly organized studios in which apprentices and assistants played an essential role, not only in learning the craft but also in actively contributing to the production of works that would ultimately bear the master’s name. These workshops functioned as sites of transmission, replication, and refinement, where copying was not only accepted but actively encouraged as a primary mode of training and dissemination.

A similar model can be observed in the practice of Peter Paul Rubens. In his case, assistants were often responsible for executing substantial portions of a painting, from backgrounds to secondary figures, while the artist himself would intervene selectively, focusing on key areas that required his direct input and ultimately ensuring the coherence of the composition. The resulting work, though materially collective, was nonetheless understood as authentically his.

The idea that a work of art is the singular, irreplicable product of one person’s hand is a fantasy that we have somehow absorbed as an art-market truth.

What emerges from these examples is a conception of authorship in which the artist’s role is defined less by the execution of every detail and more by the orchestration of a vision, by the ability to conceive, direct, and finalize a work that may, in practice, be the result of multiple hands.

Fast forward three centuries, and we arrive at Damien Hirst. His spot paintings, which now number in the thousands, are made almost entirely by assistants. He has said this openly. The dots are mechanically even, the colors mixed by others, the execution delegated. When asked whether this bothered him, he replied that he could not actually paint as well as his assistants. The spots are better without him.

A spot painting by Damien Hirst sells for a Damien Hirst price, because what they are buying is not the physical labour of his hand but access to the concept, the signature, the cultural position.

Jeff Koons operates similarly. Koons has described himself as working “more like a director.” His studio at peak production employed over 150 people. The shining stainless steel surfaces of his sculptures require a level of technical finish he does not himself possess. What he contributes is the concept, the vision, and the cultural authority to make those works.

In the current art market, the model of the artist as a conceptual originator and director clearly outweighs that of the artist as a maker, as value is assigned not to the physical labor of production, but to the intellectual and symbolic framework that defines the work. Artistic authorship has long operated through structures that are more collective, more mediated, and more complex than we are often willing to acknowledge.

Understanding this complexity does not mean dismissing the ethical questions it raises about credit, about visibility, about whether the assistants who spend years executing a famous artist’s vision should have more claim on the work than the signature allows them. These are worth having. Yet the art market now is not just a market for unique objects. It is a market for stories. For the narrative of genius, of scarcity, of cultural inevitability that institutions and dealers and auction houses construct around certain names and not others. The physical work is the vessel.

It is in this sense that the discourse around artistic value as residing entirely in the physical act of making is far more complex than it appears, encompassing a combination of concept, context, intention, and market positioning. The hand is only one component within this framework, and historically, not always the most significant one.

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In 1528, Baldassare Castiglione published Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a manual for navigating the refined and highly codified world of Renaissance courts. In it, he describes an essential quality that the perfect courtier must possess: a certain nonchalance, a cultivated ease that conceals the labor behind every gesture, every word, every display of talent.

Its root, sprezzare, means to despise or disregard. To practice sprezzatura is to perform a kind of visible indifference toward the very mastery you are displaying.

“Avoid affectation in every way possible. Practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does appear to be without effort.”

— Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, 1528

II. WHERE VALUE CANNOT BE MEASURED, BEHAVIOUR BECOMES THE PROOF

Most industries rely on one thing: the number. Revenue, yield, occupancy rate, return on equity. The art world, like luxury, like certain corners of architecture and high-end advisory, does not. The question of what something is worth cannot be answered by pointing at a spreadsheet. It can only be answered by pointing at the people who have decided it is worth something.

This is the structural condition that makes sprezzatura not merely attractive in these fields, but functionally necessary. When there is no formula for value, the people who appear most comfortable with ambiguity become the de facto arbiters of it. Confidence in the absence of certainty is, in itself, a credential. And the particular form that confidence takes, unhurried, underdressed, unimpressed, is exactly what Castiglione meant.

The psychological mechanism is precise: in a market without objective pricing, the person who most visibly needs to transact is the one who loses the most in the transaction. Desire becomes a liability. And so the learned behavior is the management of visible desire, not its elimination, because total indifference reads as ignorance, but its careful rationing. You signal that you see the value. You do not signal that you need it.

III. WHY IT WORKS: THE PSYCHOLOGY

Effortlessness signals surplus. When we perceive that someone is not straining, we unconsciously register that they possess more resources than the current task requires: time, experience, social capital, financial cushion. Surplus, in social and economic terms, is one of the clearest markers of power.

Humans are acutely sensitive to signals of effort and need. When something, or someone, appears to strive too visibly, it introduces a subtle asymmetry, suggesting that value must be argued for rather than assumed. Sprezzatura, by contrast, removes the visible traces of striving and, in doing so, shifts perception.

Scarcity of desire creates desire. This is not manipulation, or rather, it is, in the same way that all social behavior involves some choreography of impression. What distinguishes sprezzatura from mere pretension is that the underlying competence is real. The effortlessness is performed; the mastery is not.

IV. THE PARADOX OF EFFORT

Here is the central irony: sprezzatura requires enormous effort to maintain. In Castiglione’s time, it required discipline, practice, and a deep internalization of the codes one was expected to navigate. Today, it demands a similar foundation. The ability to appear effortless in high-stakes environments is often built on a significant accumulation of competence, taste, and experience. Without this underlying substance, attempts at sprezzatura risk reading as an emptiness disguised as ease.

In business, the most effective practitioners share a specific quality: they are intensely deliberate in private and entirely relaxed in public. Sprezzatura is therefore an enduring strategy for operating within systems where perception, discretion, and symbolic capital matter as much as explicit declarations of value. In a cultural moment defined by overexposure and constant articulation, that restraint becomes not only elegant, but powerful.

Advice in this regard is inherently tricky. You cannot learn sprezzatura from an article about sprezzatura. The awareness that you are practicing it undermines the practice itself. What you can do is something slower and less glamorous: accumulate genuine competence, reduce your attachment to specific outcomes, and cultivate the patience of someone who has seen how most things unfold.

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But what makes it interesting is that beneath that surface is a scene that’s incredibly refined: interested collectors, world-class galleries, historic restaurants filled with masterworks, and a lifestyle that quietly integrates culture at a very high level.

It’s not loud, it’s not trying to impress you but if you know where to go, Zurich is the place to be.

1. Kronenhalle

Since 1924, friends, families, and creative professionals have gathered at the Kronenhalle in the heart of Zürich, drawn by outstanding cuisine and an atmosphere that pays homage to tradition. What makes it extraordinary, however, is not the food alone but the walls: the collection of original works by Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Matisse, and Braque that hangs throughout the dining rooms, acquired directly by the founding Zumsteg family over decades. The interior was designed by architect and designer Robert Haussmann, and the light fixtures are by Diego Giacometti, Alberto’s brother, whose bronzework is as quietly remarkable as the paintings surrounding it.

2. Le Club Lacoste – The Dolder Grand

The Dolder Grand is one of those hotels that justifies the category of grand hotel in the most literal sense with incredible tennis and golf facilities. In collaboration with Lacoste, the hotel has reimagined its tennis experience as something closer to a private club experience: a newly designed court nestled in the surrounding forest, reserved for hotel guests, spa members, and Le Club Lacoste members. So chic!

3. Pavillon Le Corbusier

A small but iconic architectural statement. This lakeside pavilion is Le Corbusier’s final project. The coloured steel panels, modular structure, and precise proportions make it less of a building and more of a manifesto. The setting, with the lake just steps away, makes it one of those rare museum visits that feels like a genuine pleasure from start to finish. Really loved strolling around.

4. Babu’s

Babu’s opened its doors with a bakery and coffeehouse concept that was new to the city, with the aim of reinventing brunch culture and making high-quality, handmade, freshly baked bread, pastries, and cakes more available. The atmosphere is cosy and vibrant, with a steady flow of creatives and locals.

5. Kunsthaus Zürich

One of the greatest art museums of Europe, the Kunsthaus holds the largest collection of Alberto Giacometti sculptures and drawings in the world, a fact alone worth the visit :)), alongside major works by Monet, Munch, Hodler, and Picasso, and a collection of Swiss art from the 18th century to the present. The 2021 extension by David Chipperfield is a significant and well-curated addition to the exhibition space.

6. The Matcha Club

Founded by Chiara Dalla Mora, a former corporate professional turned entrepreneur, The Matcha Club was born out of a genuine frustration: matcha served outside Japan was almost never prepared correctly, tasting watery or bitter, and rarely from ceremonial-grade leaves. The result is Zürich’s contemporary organic matcha bar with a minimalist, considered identity that feels entirely right for this city.

7. UB Law

An unexpected library stop in the Faculty of Law. Its elliptical wooden skeleton spirals 30 metres up to a radiant glass dome that floods the entire atrium with natural light. The quietly breathtaking interior is one of the best architectural surprises in the city.

8. Hauser & Wirth

One of the most significant contemporary art galleries in the world, with spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Menorca among others, its original home is right here in Zürich, where Iwan and Manuela Wirth founded the gallery in 1992. A reminder that this city’s relationship with contemporary art runs considerably deeper than its reputation suggests.

9. La Stanza

A hot spot in the city with a creative, international, relaxed crowd. More about the energy and the people than just the drinks, though the menu selection is great!

10. The Bagel Shop

The Bagel Shop does one thing and does it properly: freshly made bagels with a yummy selection of fillings. The young, colourful space is the perfect lunch stop, not trying to be anything more than it is, and that’s exactly why it works.

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Somewhere in the jungles of Ubud, there is a tent that belongs to a cartographer. Not a real one. There is no cartographer. There never was. But the maps are hand-drawn, the instruments are worn at the edges, and the objects arranged across every surface tell a story so precisely that you find yourself believing it anyway. You unpack your bag in someone else’s fiction. And somehow, it feels more real than most places you have actually been.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard spent much of his career trying to account for exactly this feeling. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he described a world in which the symbol becomes more important or authoritative than the original, essentially where authenticity is replaced by copy, and reality gives way to what he called the “hyperreal”. The fiction, he argued, does not conceal the truth. It is the truth, or at least the only version of it that registers emotionally.

Whether by instinct or intention, Bill Bensley’s hotels operate on exactly this logic.

Bensley is the Bangkok-based designer behind some of Southeast Asia’s most obsessively realized hotels—essentially properties that move in the opposite direction of universally palatable designs, toward the specific, strange, overstuffed, and sincere. His hotels are stories themselves, told through objects. And what makes those stories hold is something French theorist Roland Barthes understood long before hospitality caught up: that meaning does not live with the author. It lives with the reader. In The Death of the Author (1967), Barthes argued that a text’s unity lies in the audience, not the creator.

In that tent in Ubud, the invented cartographer is not the point. You are the point. You are the reader completing the narrative by walking through it.

This is what Bill Bensley does, and there is no one quite like him.

Capella: The Brand With No Template

To understand why Bensley’s work lands the way it does, it helps to understand who he is building for.

Some of Bensley’s most notable works fall under Capella Hotels and Resorts. Capella is not a large brand. It does not want to be. With fewer than twenty properties worldwide, it sits at the quieter, more considered end of ultra-luxury hospitality, raising the bar in the Asian market on the conviction that a hotel should feel like nowhere else on earth.

Capella Hanoi: The Opera That Never Ended

Capella Hanoi opened in 2021 inside a colonial-era building in the city’s French quarter. The property is organized around a fictional world of performers, impresarios, and traveling artists who supposedly passed through the building during Hanoi’s early twentieth-century golden age of opera. More than a thousand pieces of memorabilia populate the interiors, including costumes behind glass, playbills pinned to walls, stage props arranged as if someone just set them down. Each piece is tied to a character: invented, named, given a backstory. The objects are real. The grief of a soprano who never existed is somehow, inexplicably, present in the room. The hotel is a kind of living archive of a world that never was—and that is precisely why it lingers.

Capella Hanoi Junior Suite — Source: Capella Hotels

Capella Ubud: A Jungle of Invented Lives

If Hanoi is a stage, Ubud is an expedition.

Capella Ubud is a collection of tents and pavilions suspended in the Balinese rainforest. Each tent is built around a distinct persona—the explorer, the cartographer, the naturalist, the storyteller—with handcrafted objects, commissioned artifacts, and locally made furnishings chosen to make that identity feel genuinely inhabited. Guests arrive at a life in mid-sentence: maps half-unrolled, specimens pinned to boards, journals left open on a desk.

Capella Ubud Terrace Tent — Source: Bensley

Competitive Advantage, By Object

Bensley has been explicit that his design philosophy is not meant to please everyone: “if you try to satisfy everyone, you will only create a basic box.”

It’s a strategic position that maps onto what management theorists have spent decades trying to articulate. In his foundational 1991 paper in the Journal of Management, Jay Barney argued that sustained competitive advantage derives from resources that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable. The VRIN framework, as it became known, is usually applied to corporate capabilities and supply chains, but it describes a Bensley property quite well. A sourced antique is valuable. A commissioned narrative built over years is rare. A thousand pieces of opera memorabilia tied to invented characters is imperfectly imitable. And no amount of capital can substitute for the accumulated curatorial decisions that produced it.

This is the commercial logic that most hotel procurement departments miss. They are optimizing for cost efficiency within a category, focusing on selecting furniture, art, and objects that hit a price point, when the actual competitive question is whether those objects can be replicated by a rival with the same budget. With this kind of thinking in mind, what emerges is a subtle though consequential shift, where the hotel becomes an opinionated environment—one whose opinion, expressed through objects, compounds into brand differentiation on the property and pricing power at the revenue management level.

An important distinction to make, however, is that not every hotel should attempt what Bensley does. Most cannot, and should not. At the ultra-luxury end of the market, where location is table stakes and service quality is assumed, the conventional levers of differentiation have largely been exhausted. What remains, and what commands the most durable pricing power, is irreproducibility. Bensley is evidence of where value can be generated when everything else has been commoditized.

The Financial Paradox

An opinionated environment, it turns out, has an accounting problem.

In standard hotel development, interiors are classified under FF&E—furniture, fixtures, and equipment—and depreciated on a fixed schedule, typically over seven to ten years. Every line item in the room is assumed to move in one direction: down.

Art breaks that assumption. And the deeper you look, the stranger it gets.

Under GAAP accounting, a curated collection sits on the books at original purchase cost, depreciating like any other FF&E asset—eventually written down to zero. In reality, well-assembled collections can hold or appreciate in value over decades, quietly moving in the opposite direction to everything else on the balance sheet. This gap between book value and fair market value—invisible on the income statement—is a real source of wealth that standard hotel accounting often cannot see.

The practical implications for owners and developers are clear. Not everything in a Bensley property appreciates—custom upholstery, soft furnishings, and lighting fixtures follow the standard FF&E depreciation curve like any other hotel interior. But within the same room, a sourced antique, a site-specific work, or a locally made artifact with genuine provenance follows an entirely different curve. The balance sheet treats them identically. Standard accounting cannot distinguish between a sofa and a piece of opera memorabilia tied to an invented character in a fictional narrative—both are written down on the same schedule, toward the same zero.

The gap between those two curves is where the mispricing lives. Art-forward properties are likely being underwritten on compressed NOI assumptions that fail to account for the pricing power a curated environment generates. RevPAR premiums driven by narrative identity and irreproducibility do not show up as a discrete line in the pro forma—they are absorbed into blended rate assumptions and treated as a function of location or brand rather than curatorial investment. The result is that at acquisition, the cap rate calculation systematically undervalues exactly the assets that drive the most durable outperformance.

The Designer Who Builds for You

Most hotels are built to be understood immediately. Bensley’s are built to be completed by you, walking through them, choosing what to believe. In turn, his properties command higher rates, resist imitation, and accumulate value in ways the balance sheet cannot see.

The reason Bensley remains genuinely difficult to replicate is not the antiques, or the memorabilia, or the hand-drawn maps. It is the understanding that a hotel is a text, where the guest—unpacking their bag in someone else’s fiction, half-believing in a cartographer who never existed—is always the reader.

Nobody else in hospitality is building for that reader. Bensley has been doing it for thirty years.

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I could not help noticing how well-dressed the tourists were, attempting the Italian ease. When travellers make the effort to genuinely blend with the spirit of a city rather than pass through, something shifts in the quality of the whole experience.

These are my favourite artsy spots around the city. The obvious icons such as Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore are implied.

1. Grotta del Buontalenti

Tucked into the Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti, the Grotta del Buontalenti, completed between 1583 and 1593, is one of the most beautiful spaces the Mannerist imagination ever produced. The same restless creative mind of Bernardo Buontalenti that conceived this grotto is also credited with inventing gelato. The interior drips with artificial stalactites, embedded shells, and frescoed figures half-emerging from the walls as though the stone itself were alive. A masterpiece that most visitors to the Boboli walk straight past.

2. Palazzo Strozzi

The grandest Renaissance palazzo in Florence, built by one of the city’s richest noble families, is also one of the best contemporary art venues in Italy. It creates genuine dialogue between historic architecture and contemporary work rather than simply using one as a backdrop for the other. The programming is consistently ambitious and internationally significant.

Currently on view is a major Mark Rothko retrospective, the largest dedicated to the American painter ever held in Italy, bringing together his iconic colour field canvases.

3. Numeroventi

A discreet address, almost residential in feeling, that has quietly become one of the most considered art and design spots in the city. Part boutique hotel and culinary space, part cultural residency, part living cultural experiment, Numeroventi resists easy categorization in the best possible way. Begin your mornings with breakfast by Sforno Bakery, part of the same group behind the hottest wine bar Il Santino, explore the current exhibition, share wine and stories at the Residence Wine Club with Table Nexus, or spend an evening with Bar Romantika’s live music.

4. La Ménagère

Concept store, restaurant, bar, flower shop, and home goods all held within a beautifully restored 19th-century space near San Lorenzo. La Ménagère understood the logic of the hybrid space before it became a formula, and it still does it better than most. The breakfast is as good as the place is beautiful which, given the setting, is saying something.

5. La Loggia Roof Bar, Palazzo Guadagni

Piazza Santo Spirito is already one of the most beautiful squares in Florence, and from the rooftop loggia of Palazzo Guadagni it becomes something else entirely. We were recommended the Margot and the Chiantishire, two of the best cocktails we have ever had, and watched the sunset change over the rooftops. Truly magical.

6. Ginori 1735

The Ginori 1735 flagship boutique is not a shop in the ordinary sense. Founded in 1735 in Doccia, just outside Florence, it is one of the oldest porcelain manufacturers in Europe. The tableware, the vases, the archive pieces reissued in new colourways all presented in the most beautiful possible way.

7. Santa Maria Novella & Santa Croce

Two of the most celebrated churches in the history of Italian art.

What I appreciate most about Santa Maria Novella is that the interior is not overloaded with frescoes, which brings full attention to the mastery of those present in the chapels and choir. The façade is one of the earliest examples of mathematical proportion applied to architecture, and the cloister is one of those quietly beautiful spaces that makes you want to stroll around. Inside, among others, you can find Masaccio’s Trinity, Ghirlandaio’s frescoed choir, and Brunelleschi’s wooden crucifix.

Santa Croce, meanwhile, is where Florence buries its great: Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Ghiberti all rest here beneath Giotto’s frescoed chapels. The same logic applies: not overwhelming, but what is there is extraordinary.

8. Il Santino

The hottest wine bar in Florence with the coolest crowd. A compact, perfectly curated wine list and outstanding small plates. Ideal for aperitivo or a late evening glass. Il Santino is part of the same family as trattoria Il Santo Bevitore and Sforno Bakery, three addresses that together cover every moment of the day with the same considered approach. Graphically their website is also worth a visit in itself —ilsantobevitore.com :)

9. Giunti Odeon

A historic Art Nouveau cinema, built in 1922, manages to be a movie theatre, a functioning bookshop, and one of the most atmospheric interiors in the city simultaneously. Such a hidden gem worth visiting even if you leave with nothing. Though you will not leave with nothing.

10. Antico Ristoro di Cambi & Il Latini

Restaurants in Florence encapsulate the best kind of ambiance not overly fancy or curated, yet always considered, with wooden tables, art hanging on the walls, and exceptional cuisine.

Antico Ristoro di Cambi, located in the Oltrarno, is worth every step of the walk: the bistecca Fiorentina was impeccable, the wine well chosen, and we got the coziest table. Il Latini near Santa Maria Novella feels like home. The pasta is extraordinary and the welcome genuinely warm.

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Walk into the right kind of place today a concept store, a restaurant, a wine bar and the art on the walls is rarely permanent.

I have been pleasantly impressed by places like Galerie on Sunset in LA, where artworks on display are curated, changed on a rotating basis, and quietly available for purchase while guests linger over a drink.

In New York, the Lower East Side space Colbo merges a fashion boutique, bar, vinyl shop, and exhibition space. It hosts rotating artists, DJs, designers, and pop-ups more like a cultural hangout than a store.

These places aren’t galleries in the traditional sense. But I believe they are quietly becoming the most influential art spaces especially for young emerging artists.

And the logic behind them is surprisingly simple as art consumption is starting to behave like music streaming.

The Spotify model of taste

For most of the 20th century, art functioned like owning vinyl.

Collectors bought artworks permanently. Spaces committed to a stable identity. A restaurant hung paintings once and kept them for years.

Today, taste is fluid. It updates constantly like a playlist.

Art rental programs and rotating exhibitions allow collectors, brands, and spaces to swap works regularly or eventually purchase them after living with them.

This shift reflects a broader cultural change: ownership is being replaced by access.

Spotify replaced CDs.

Airbnb replaced vacation homes.

Art rental may replace static collecting — at least for public spaces.

The new cultural intermediaries: spaces with taste

The emergence of hybrid cultural spaces are an interesting phenomenon. They function simultaneously as:

• gallery

• café/restaurant/wine bar

• concept store

• social hub

• curatorial platform

These places act as filters of taste. You don’t visit them only to buy something. You go there to understand what feels culturally relevant right now. A role historically monopolized by galleries.

From a business perspective, the model is brilliant as art provides 3 things every hospitality or retail space desperately wants:

1. Atmosphere

Art instantly gives a place cultural depth. A painting changes how people photograph the room, how long they stay, even how expensive the wine feels.

2. Built-in reasons to return

Rotating exhibitions create built-in programming. Every few months there is a reason to return, a new artist, a new opening, a new crowd.

3. Revenue without inventory risk

Through consignment or rental agreements, venues can show art without buying it outright. If it sells, the space receives a commission. If it doesn’t, the walls simply change next month.

For artists, these spaces provide something galleries often struggle with: visibility within real life. A painting above a dinner table may reach founders, collectors, fashion people, architects and people who might never walk into a gallery.

It places art inside the flow of culture rather than isolating it inside the art world.

Taste is becoming ambient

What makes these spaces interesting is that they don’t present art as something to stop and contemplate.

Instead, art becomes ambient culture.

You see it while ordering wine. While trying on a jacket. While waiting for friends. This is how taste actually spreads. Quietly through spaces.

My practice

I’m currently developing a curatorial practice focused on bringing art into commercial and hospitality environments: restaurants, concept stores, hotels, and private social spaces.

What interests me most is the intersection between two logics that are rarely considered together:

• the investment logic of art — value, provenance, collecting strategy backed by my background at Bocconi University in Milan and the Art Finance & Investment course at Sotheby’s London.

• the experiential logic of spaces — atmosphere, identity, and cultural positioning informed by my work alongside art advisor Truls Blaasmo and projects connected to Milan Design Week, Art Basel Paris, NOMAD St. Moritz, and Heavensake in Tokyo.

In other words: how art can function simultaneously as a cultural asset and as a tool for shaping environments.

If you’re developing a space and would like to explore curating art as part of its atmosphere and identity, feel free to get in touch.

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It pains me to see soulless white-light souvenir shops dotting the main streets in a city that was once the most elegant crossroads of the silk trade and a global hub for the finest exchanges between East and West.

Nevertheless, if you know where to go, Venice can still be experienced as the dreamlike, curated encounter it was always meant to be. A blend of major art institutions, hidden gems, and new openings to save for your next trip, especially with Biennale Arte 2026 in the frame.

Here’s how I like to experience Venice: slow, cherry-picked, and always with an eye for beauty.

1. Peggy Guggenheim Collection

No conversation about art in Venice begins anywhere else.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) was arguably one of the most important private patron of the 20th-century avant-garde. She befriended, supported, and collected works by Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Pollock, and Ernst (whom she also married), often acquiring pieces for extraordinary sums that would become priceless.

After living in Paris and London and running her legendary gallery, she settled permanently in Venice in 1949, at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, filled with an intimate, personal, and unique collection.

2. Punta della Dogana & Palazzo Grassi

The Pinault Collection

François Pinault, the French billionaire and founder of Kering, acquired Palazzo Grassi in 2005. Designed by Giorgio Massari in the 18th century, the palazzo was followed by a second acquisition: Punta della Dogana, the former customs house at the tip of Dorsoduro where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca, in 2009. Together they form one of the world’s most significant private contemporary art platforms.

Both spaces were redesigned by one of my favourite architects, Tadao Ando, with his characteristic blend of concrete, light, and space brought into conversation with historic Venetian architecture.

3. Harry’s Dolci

Harry’s Bar is an institution. The birthplace of the Bellini, beloved by Hemingway, Orson Welles, and royalty too numerous to name. Harry’s Dolci, its quieter sibling on the Giudecca island, is a more discreet choice.

Take a boat across, which is part of the experience, and the arrival at the Giudecca waterfront immediately changes the atmosphere, away from the tourist press of San Marco. Harry’s Dolci shares the same Cipriani philosophy instilled by Giuseppe Cipriani, but the pace is gentler, the tables more generous, and the views are incomparably dreamy on a fine afternoon.

4. Negozio Olivetti

Right in Piazza San Marco sits one of the great jewels of 20th-century Italian design, and almost everyone walks past it without knowing.

Carlo Scarpa designed this showroom for the Olivetti typewriter company in 1958, and it remains one of the finest examples of his extraordinary craft: the way he handles stone, the floating staircase, the interplay between levels, the relationship with light and water. Scarpa was a Venetian architect who understood the city’s layered materiality better than almost anyone.

5. Aman Venice

Housed in the 16th-century Palazzo Papadopoli, Aman Venice may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. The ballroom with frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo, the private garden (one of the very few in the city), the Murano glass chandeliers, the suites with their painted ceilings: it is a property that makes you understand why Venice was once the most powerful and most beautiful city on earth.

Even if you are not staying, the bar and the terrace are accessible, making it a discreet hub for the quieter conversations.

6. Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel

Palazzo Bottega Veneta

Bottega Veneta, a house whose very name means “Venetian artisanal shop” took on the guardianship of a 15th-century Gothic palazzo in Cannaregio, built between 1473 and 1479 for the Soranzo family using materials recovered from an even older Byzantine palace.

Ex-creative director Matthieu Blazy created a living cultural space for private appointments and curated experiences for the house’s most valued clients and guests.

7. Palazzo Manfrin

Anish Kapoor Foundation

Anish Kapoor’s relationship with Venice runs deep.

In 2022, the British-Indian sculptor acquired the historic Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio, one of the largest privately owned palazzi in Venice, with the intention of establishing a permanent foundation and exhibition space dedicated to his work. It will be accessible to the public in May during Biennale after four years of restoration.

8. The Venice Venice Hotel

Golden Goose

Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo, the Venetian couple who founded Golden Goose, turned their creative energy toward the city. The Venice Venice Hotel is one of several bold moves that show just how far their creative vision extends beyond fashion. The hotel occupies Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto, widely considered the oldest on the Grand Canal, a Byzantine structure dating to the 13th century that had spent decades in abandonment before their restoration.

Their guiding concept is POSTVENEZIANITÀ – a cultural movement they coined to describe a Venice capable of genuine dialogue with contemporary life without sacrificing its roots. Each room has been conceived as a distinct piece, with collaborations spanning Arte Povera, conceptual art, radical architecture, and Fluxus.

9. AMA Venezia

Venice has a long tradition of collectors who arrive and never quite leave.

Laurent Asscher is a Belgian collector and philanthropist and one of the most compelling to have chosen La Serenissima as his home for art. AMA Venezia, named after the initials of his three children, opened in April 2025 in a meticulously retrofitted former soap factory on Fondamenta de Ca’ Vendramin. The collection has a particular focus on American artists from the 1960s to the present.

10. Fondazione Dries Van Noten

One of 2026’s most anticipated cultural openings.

Dries Van Noten, who stepped back from his label in 2024 after nearly four decades, and his partner, the chef Patrick Vangheluwe, acquired the magnificent Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Built in the late 15th century in Venetian Gothic Fiorito style and redecorated between 1735 and 1750 by Chiara Pisani in an immaculate Rococo idiom with frescoes by Tiepolo, Guarana, Diziani, and Angeli, the palazzo has hosted an annual Carnival masquerade for centuries and appeared in films from Casino Royale to The Tourist.

The Fondazione is dedicated entirely to craftsmanship. As Van Noten has put it: “Craftsmanship is things that you do with your hands, yes, but also with your soul.”

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Subject matter

Beautiful woman > elderly woman > anonymous man
Nude > clothed
Female nude > male nude
Calm water > turbulent water > shipwrecks
Figure > landscape > still life
Abstraction as stand-alone case
Purebred > mixed breeds

The single biggest driver of long-term appreciation, beyond the artist’s reputation, is what the painting depicts.

Portraits of beautiful women and children consistently outperform portraits of elderly subjects or anonymous men.

Nude figures tend to sell better than clothed ones. And female nudes, historically and still today, outperform male nudes by a significant margin.

Water is a fascinating case. Calm water adds value, think of how Monet’s Water Lilies series has performed. Turbulent water tends to reduce value. Shipwrecks reduce it further.

Figurative works outperform landscapes, and landscapes outperform still lifes. Within still lifes, however, flowers outperform fruit, and there is an entire sub-hierarchy of floral desirability.

Abstraction is a peculiar case: when produced by certain artists, it can reach extraordinary price levels. Yet figurative imagery attracts a broader collector base, including less specialised buyers. Abstract works, by contrast, often require a more educated and historically aware audience, which can reduce the pool of potential buyers at any given time.

Animal subjects follow a fairly strict hierarchy. Purebred dogs sell better than mixed breeds. Horses associated with nobility or sport outperform working horses. Among birds, hunting scenes command the highest prices.

Color

Red > white > blue > yellow > green > black
Bright, saturated > muted, opaque
Primary palette > tertiary palette

Color follows a surprisingly consistent market logic.

Bright, saturated hues outperform muddy or muted ones. When two works by the same artist are otherwise equal, the warmer and brighter one will typically command a premium. Works dominated by violet, brown, or grey tend to struggle unless they are the artist’s unmistakable signature, as in the case of the deep blue developed by Yves Klein.

Brett Gorvy, International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie's, articulated a descending order of market-friendly colors: red, white, blue, yellow, green, black. There is one famous exception worth noting: for Warhol, green performs exceptionally well because green is the color of money, as economist Donald Thompson expressed in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art.

Format and Orientation

Horizontal > vertical
Square = strong in contemporary
Mid-size > very large (in terms of liquidity)

Horizontal canvases sell better than vertical ones. They integrate more easily into domestic and corporate interiors, and they read more naturally in large-scale contemporary living spaces.

Square formats have gained considerable prestige in the contemporary market, particularly for works by living artists.

Size matters, but in a nuanced way. Larger works command higher prices in absolute terms, but they are less liquid: the pool of buyers shrinks with the dimensions. Mid-size works are consistently the most tradeable over time.

Obscenity and Transgression

Decency > Obscenity (for most artists)
Transgression = brand (for a handful of superstars)

The market generally does not reward shock for its own sake.

Controversial content complicates institutional loans, insurance, and resale. But for certain artists whose entire market identity is built around provocation, obscenity amplifies rather than diminishes demand. This is a privilege of dominant market position, not a general strategy.

Provenance and Period

Exhibited, catalogued > never shown publicly, undocumented
Signed on front > signed on back
Mature period > early or experimental work
Recognizable work > one-off

Beyond what a work depicts and how it looks, its history matters enormously.

Institutional exhibition history, catalogue documentation, and distinguished prior ownership all add measurable value.

Works signed on the front generally trade more easily, all else being equal.

Within an artist’s career, the mature phase, when the signature style is most fully formed, usually commands the highest prices.

A work that looks immediately and unmistakably like that artist will almost always outperform experimental detours, even when the latter may be artistically more interesting as the market rewards legibility.

A Final Note

Everything above describes tendencies, not certainties. Works that go against every observation listed here can achieve extraordinary results if the artist, the moment, and the collector chemistry align. What these patterns offer is a baseline: an understanding of what the market tends to reward when all else is equal.

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Here’s my personal insider route through the city, where art blends into how cafés are designed, which books are stocked, and how museums frame views.

1. Louisiana Museum

This is non-negotiable.

Located just outside the city, Louisiana is one of the most refined museum experiences both architecturally and curatorially. The building opens directly onto the sea, and exhibitions flow through glass corridors and sculpture gardens.

It’s the kind of place where art, landscape and design culture feel completely inseparable. My favourite room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the water, where sculptures almost come alive.

2. Beau Marché Café à Vins

Beau Marché is technically a café, wine bar and interior design shop all in one, but it feels more like stepping into someone’s very good taste. The owners have French roots, and it shows in the round café tables spilling onto the street, the wicker chairs, the floor-to-ceiling wine bottles, and that effortlessly casual elegance the French do so well.

The food choice is small but delicious, but what you’re really here for is the atmosphere, the hidden courtyard, the rustic tables, and the sense that you’ve found something slightly off the beaten path even though you’re in the middle of town.

3. Ruby Atelier

Ruby Atelier hosts carefully curated vintage furniture alongside contemporary art. The space challenges the traditional gallery experience by treating furniture and art as part of the same visual conversation, as in the case of Pierre Jeanneret’s chairs placed next to abstract paintings.

4. Copenhagen Contemporary

CC is where the city shows its most ambitious, large-scale contemporary art in an old shipyard area.

The permanent highlight is James Turrell’s Aftershock, a Ganzfeld installation created specifically for CC, a sensory space filled with intense coloured light that creates complete disorientation where boundaries dissolve. After years as a beloved temporary installation, CC purchased it permanently in 2024.

5. Louise Roe & The Roe bar

Louise Roe is both a designer and a testament to Danish aesthetic sensibility, through clean lines, natural materials and pieces that feel contemporary without trying too hard.

The Roe Bar, connected to the showroom space, continues this philosophy: it’s about creating an environment where good design is simply the baseline. Food and coffee are top-notch.

6. Storm & Naked concept stores

Two concept stores close to one another, encapsulating an ever-evolving selection of clothing, accessories, books and objects, such as my favourite cups and flower vases by Niko June.

The spaces themselves are minimal, almost gallery-like, letting the pieces take the spotlight.

7. HAY house

The HAY House flagship takes up multiple floors and functions as a showroom. You’ll find furniture, textiles, lighting and kitchen objects, all embodying that particular Danish ability to make functionality beautiful without making it precious. My favourite objects are the funky candles with their holders.

8. Apotek 57

Within Frama’s design there is a beautifully curated café and bakery shop.

It’s one of the most popular spots in terms of both food quality and crowd. Expect a queue at peak hours, as it’s walk-in only.

9. Soho House Copenhagen

Soho House Copenhagen is always a safe choice in terms of setting and atmosphere.

One particular evening I recall was when a local artist was painting live during aperitivo and into the night, with the space functioning simultaneously as a social venue, bar and impromptu studio. There is always something fun going on.

10. New Mags

New Mags has a highly curated selection of books on art, design, fashion, watches, architecture, and visual culture, presented in a space that treats books as the design objects they are. The space itself is minimal and considered, letting the books do the talking. It’s the kind of place where you go in for one book and leave with three, not because of aggressive merchandising but because the curation is that good.

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That story reveals another layer of art, showing how it operates not merely as an asset class, but as a powerful social instrument. The tradition stretches back to Ancient Rome and Greece, where wealthy patrons understood that commissioning sculptures, temples, and public monuments was not just about artistic splendor but rather inscribing themselves into the cultural fabric of their time and creating an enduring legacy by belonging to civilization itself. A fortune could be invested, spent, or stolen, but a work commissioned in someone’s name outlived them. The origins of art patronage may be a story for another article, but the mechanism remains relevant, with art functioning as a currency of legitimacy and as the force that turns wealth into lasting status.

Economists would describe artworks as positional goods: objects whose value is inseparable from the position they grant within a social hierarchy. For someone who is already comfortably wealthy, there are very few things that can generate as much symbolic power as a recognizable artwork. Luxury, by contrast, has become increasingly noisy. A fast car? Anyone with a decent year in crypto or a successful exit can write that cheque. A small yacht is attainable for many. Art, however, still creates distinction because it operates through a shared cultural code. A large, recognizable slashed canvas on a living-room wall immediately triggers recognition, signaling taste, education, and cultural sophistication categorizing its owner among rich people who rich right.

What is often misunderstood is that not all art generates status. Most artworks never will. Thompson, in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, uses the example of Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1958), owned by Michael Ovitz.

Possessing a work like that, he writes, “elevates you above the crowd of collectors and makes you unreachable.” There is a hierarchy even within the art world. At the highest ranks of collecting, money by itself has very little meaning, simply because everyone already has it. But owning a rare, historically significant piece puts you in an entirely different category. Thompson refers to branded artworks, noting that, just as fashion houses create aspirational status symbols through logos and recognition, certain artists become brands unto themselves. A Hirst, a Koons, a Basquiat are names that carry instant recognition, even among people who know nothing about art. They are the Hermès Birkin bags of the walls, and they perform the same function: immediate, legible status. But truly savvy collectors understand that the brand is not enough. It is about owning the right piece by the right artist. Colour, size, date, and provenance all matter.

Those who counterfeited were trying to do what a high net worth collector does: convert financial capital into cultural capital, to transform money (which is common among their peers) into respectable prestige (which is rare). This is precisely how perceived value is created.

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1. Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano

A very Milanese way to begin.

Hidden in a residential building, this apartment museum was the private collection of Antonio Boschi and Marieda di Stefano, two of the most important private patrons of twentieth-century Italian art. The space itself is unchanged from how they lived: de Chirico, Fontana, Morandi, and Sironi hang in rooms that still feel like a home. What makes it special is the intimacy. You’re not looking at art in a white cube, you’re experiencing major artists in corridors and living rooms.

Entry is free, which somehow adds to its charm. It feels like Milan’s best-kept secret.

2. Chiesa Rossa — Dan Flavin

One of Milan’s most understated contemporary installations.

The church sits in a less central part of the city, but it hosts one of Dan Flavin’s most important permanent European works. The American minimalist master installed colored fluorescent lights throughout this 1930s church, transforming the interior into a glowing, ethereal space where art, architecture, and spirituality merge. The light shifts depending on where you stand, what time of day you visit, how the natural light interacts with Flavin’s neons.

“It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else” — Flavin once said of his work. Flavin’s light structures neither affirm nor deny the divine; they simply exist, proving nothing beyond their own presence and allowing neither to prevail.

My tip is to visit after sunset when the colors can really pop out and the space becomes almost otherworldly.

3. Villa Panza — Varese

Villa Panza is about an hour’s drive from Milan, but it’s absolutely worth the trip.

The villa was owned by Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and his wife Giovanna, one of the most influential patrons of American minimal and conceptual art in Europe. The collection includes site-specific installations by James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Dan Flavin among others, works that were created for these exact rooms, responding to the architecture, light, and atmosphere of the villa itself.

At the time, Italian museums did not yet have the sensitivity to receive contemporary works of this kind, so he donated the villa with its collection to FAI for public fruition.

The collection is recognized worldwide as a prime destination for contemporary art enthusiasts.

4. Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa

Not for the faint of heart, but its unexpected uniqueness makes it unforgettable.

The ossuary is a small Baroque space entirely decorated with human bones arranged in ornamental patterns. It’s macabre, yes, but there’s something mesmerizing about it: a reminder of mortality that’s both confronting and strangely peaceful. The space dates back centuries and represents a tradition of memento mori.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

5. Villa Necchi Campiglio & Galleria Massimo De Carlo

A beautiful intersection of architecture, design, art and a pool that feels impossibly chic even by today’s standards.

Villa Necchi is a masterpiece of Italian rationalism by architect Piero Portaluppi. The house preserves an extraordinary collection spanning from works contemporary to its construction, like pieces by Fausto Pirandello (Luigi’s son), to major names including Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and Fontana hung throughout the upper floors.

Another Portaluppi masterpiece hosts Massimo De Carlo, one of Italy’s most internationally recognized contemporary galleries. The historic rationalist elegance meets cutting-edge contemporary art, both essential to understanding Milan’s cultural identity.

6. Gucci Boutique

Not just a fashion stop.

The historic Gucci boutique on Via Montenapoleone, first opened in 1951, was recently reimagined under former creative director Sabato De Sarno with interiors that balance Seventies references and industrial undertones. But what elevated the space was the art collection curated by independent curator Truls Blaasmo. Works by masters like Lucio Fontana and Getulio Alviani appear alongside contemporary pieces by Franco Mazzucchelli, Getulio Alviani and Augustas Serapinas integrated throughout the boutique rather than hung as decoration.

It’s a sharp example of how art can inhabit commercial environments without compromising conceptual depth. The best retail spaces understand that art and design pieces are part of the experience, part of what makes a space worth remembering.

7. Casa Cipriani

Casa Cipriani quietly operates as a curated environment rather than a simple hospitality space. It channels the cultural legacy of the original Harry’s Bar in Venice, where figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, and Ernest Hemingway once gathered.

The Milan outpost has carried forward this tradition through initiatives such as Arte a Casa, which brought together Italian galleries to integrate works by artists like Agostino Bonalumi, Lucio Fontana, CB Hoyo and Monica Bonvicini throughout the club’s interiors.

Here you’re surrounded by pieces that speak to a certain vision of Italian cultural life, one where great food, great design, and great art aren’t separate categories but part of the same pursuit of beauty and quality.

8. Gallerie d’Italia — Caveau

One of Milan’s most overlooked exhibition spaces.

Gallerie d’Italia is worth visiting for the collection alone, but what makes the experience special is the contrast: the monumental, austere architecture framing both classical masterpieces together with modern and contemporary works. It’s intellectually very satisfying, but the Caveau is the real insider moment.

It opens once a month by appointment and it was the bank’s original vault, defined by heavy doors, reinforced walls and mid-century engineering. Where the safety deposit boxes once stood, around 500 Italian works from the second half of the 20th century are now held, with a selection shown on a rotating basis.

9. Casa Gregotti

Casa Gregotti is a recently opened private home gallery that blends the intimacy of a historic residence with the vitality of a contemporary cultural space.

Housed in the former apartment of art collector Quinto Gregotti, redesigned in the 1960s with the help of his nephew, architect Vittorio Gregotti, the space has been carefully restored to host exhibitions, site-specific projects, talks and events that create a continuous dialogue.

Accessible by appointment, the space positions itself as a fresh and new cultural salon in the city.

10. Fondazione Prada

A necessary final stop.

Founded by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, Fondazione Prada has become one of Europe’s most influential contemporary art institutions. It’s where Milan shows its most international, ambitious, and intellectually curious side.

The complex, designed by OMA under Rem Koolhaas, is a study in contrasts. Historic industrial buildings sit alongside new structures wrapped in gold leaf and the iconic Bar Luce designed by American film director Wes Anderson.

The exhibitions have included everything from major retrospectives to new installations that push boundaries. But even beyond what’s on view, the architecture itself rewards exploration.

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