The Ferragamo Portrait Milano, a former 16th-century seminary, has been transformed by Michele Bonan into a hotel while preserving its architectural history
The Ferragamo family’s Portrait Milano in Milan is built on multiple layers of history. Its origins are 16th century. Archbishop Carlo Borromeo – canonised after his death – established the Seminario Maggiore. He found a site within the city’s medieval walls five minutes walk from the Duomo to train young men for the priesthood. The heroically proportioned cloister at its heart has become encrusted into the fabric of the city centre which grew around it.
Step by step the seminary vacated the building over the years, making way for a range of different uses. Finally, the Ferragamo’s Lungarno group from Florence took on the complex to make the cloister into the hotel that opened in 2024 after an impressive but respectful transformation by the architect Michele Bonan. This involved more than the rehabilitation of a single building, it is a piece of urban renewal of a particularly sensitive area. There is a pool and spa under the courtyard now, restaurants and shops on the ground floor of the colonnade, and some memorable installations in the centre of the courtyard during the Salone del Mobile furniture fair. The Rumore bar is the place for a quiet cocktail. Breakfast is best taken in the 10/11 restaurant overlooking the garden. If you are fashion shopping on the via della Spiga, you can reach the hotel by cutting through the alley that twists and turns from the via Sant’ Andrea until you find the courtyard. But the best way to make an entrance is from the Corso Venezia, through a baroque gateway six metres high built from honey coloured stone and flanked by a pair of caryatids. It was designed by Francesco Maria Richini in 1652 as the seminary’s main entrance. It has an elaborate pediment and cornice and a rusticated base. The baroque architecture is a remarkable urban monument. But the site has a more recent layer of history overlaying it. This was where Olivetti, one of Italy’s greatest patrons of design and architecture from the 1930s to the 1990s established studios to accommodate its two leading designers and their teams, Ettore Sottsass and Mario Bellini.
The first time I walked through the gate on Corso Venezia was in the 1980s when I came here to interview Bellini. Across the courtyard a chapel still existed on the ground floor. But the archdiocese had rented out the upper two floors of one of the ancillary buildings. Bellini had his personal office under the roof, which he decorated with life size black and white photographic versions of Gentile Bellini murals. The first floor was divided between Bellini and Sottsass.
Bonan’s interiors for the hotel rooms refer to a slightly earlier period of Milanese design history without being historical recreations. They have the flavour of the bourgeois living rooms of the 1950s, with lacquer and white carrara marble and red porphyry finishes. The furniture is inspired by Luigi Caccia Dominioni and Gio Ponti; the leather and bronzed brass details suggest the hotel’s Florentine roots. It’s a combination that gives it the sense that it has always been here, rather than trying too hard to be fashionable. Milan’s place as the capital of design is hinted at by the framed working drawings such as Achille Castiglioni’s design for the Taccia light for Flos from 1962, on the walls.
Portrait Milano offers rooms starting from £890 per night, find out more here
