Orient Express Makes Its Hotel Debut, Steps from the Pantheon
Hugo Toro's design for La Minerva, the brand's first-ever hotel, layers Art Deco and Roman domus over a 17th-century palace — the storied train name's first real address on solid ground.
For more than a century, Orient Express has meant a train, not a building. That changed with La Minerva, the brand's first hotel, set inside a restored 17th-century palace a few steps from the Pantheon in Rome. It's a fitting first address: the palace sits on Piazza della Minerva, named for a temple to the goddess that once stood nearby, and the hotel leans into that history rather than smoothing it over. Ninety-three rooms and suites, some as large as 235 square metres, are arranged through a building whose bones are unmistakably Roman, with four signature suites given the best of it - direct views over the Pantheon and the piazza below.
The design is the work of Hugo Toro, the Franco-Mexican architect and designer, who chose to layer two very different reference points rather than settle for one. Art Deco supplies the hotel's more theatrical instincts - the kind of glamour the Orient Express name has traded on since the 1920s - while the plan and detailing borrow from the Roman domus, the courtyard-centred house type that shaped how wealthy Romans actually lived two thousand years ago. It's a harder combination to pull off than it sounds: Art Deco is a decorative language, domus planning is a spatial one, and using the second to discipline the first is what keeps the hotel from reading as pure pastiche.
The clearest expression of that idea is La Minerva bar, built around a historic light well that the design treats as the room's actual subject rather than an inconvenience to work around. Lit from above and dressed as a quiet tribute to the goddess the piazza is named for, it does the thing a good hotel bar in Rome should do: make you feel like you're inside the city's history rather than visiting a themed version of it. Upstairs, Voliera, the rooftop bar and restaurant, does the opposite kind of work — Mediterranean food, cocktails, and a terrace view over a skyline that doesn't need much help looking good at golden hour.
Below ground, the spa breaks from expected luxury-hotel wellness in a more interesting way, built around Ottoman-style bath rituals rather than the usual treatment-menu formula. It's a small design decision that says something larger: this hotel is drawing on the wider Mediterranean world Rome has always traded with, not just its own Roman past.
Orient Express opened a second Italian hotel this year in Venice — a 15th-century palazzo in Cannaregio, 47 rooms, designed by Aline Asmar d'Amman with a noticeably different hand than Toro's. Seen together, the two properties suggest a brand figuring out what it wants to be now that it's more than a train: not a single fixed aesthetic, but a name attached to serious architects doing serious restoration work on serious buildings. "This marks with pride the opening of the very first Orient Express hotel in the world," said Gilda Perez-Alvarado, the brand's CEO, when La Minerva opened - a fair amount of pride for a hotel that, on the evidence of the design alone, has earned it.
