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On the Uffizi-side of Florence's Ponte Santa Trinita, at the corner of via dei Tornabuoni, there is a pretty, pink, 13th-century palace: Palazzo Spini Feroni, the headquarters of the Ferragamo dynasty. At street level is the Italian fashion label's flagship store. Up the wide and winding stairs are its offices, and on the top floor is the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, which few people know exists, where the shoemaker's heritage is displayed in four tiny rooms.
Even more unexpected is the fact that the Ferragamos also own hotels.
Peer out of a tiny top-floor window of the Palazzo Spini Feroni and you can just about see all five: on the Uffizi-side, the Continentale, the Gallery Hotel Art and Lungarno Suites; on the opposite bank the Hotel Lungarno and Palazzo Capponi. All are within a single block dissected by the River Arno, marked by the Ponte Santa Trinita to the west and Ponte Vecchio to the east. A 10-minute walk will take you past each one.
For the Ferragamos, service matters more than anything else. 'It's the same in fashion: the customer is king,' says Leonardo Ferragamo, Salvatore's second son who is responsible for, among other things, the hotel division which goes under the name of Lungarno Alberghi S.p.A. Recently, there has been a flurry of fashion houses getting in on the boutique-hotel boom. Versace was among the first, followed by Bvlgari and most recently Cerruti. For the most part, these are 'fashion hotels' that rely heavily on well-known brand names to get them noticed. The Ferragamo family has taken a
different approach.
'You will never see the Ferragamo name in a room,' says Leonardo. 'For us, it's far more important to work on substance rather than brand positioning.' 'When we first got into hotels in 1995, we deliberately didn't put out the Ferragamo name,' says Leonardo. 'We didn't want to take advantage of a label that had become famous for other reasons. It's the same with the boat company we now own, Nautor, which produces Swan sailing yachts. Why? Because the Ferragamo name wouldn't mean much to the people who care about the most beautiful luxury boats in the world. You see, the things we are involved in are quite separate, and to have integrity, I think everything needs to be in its own area of expertise. The only thing shared between the hotels is a family standard.' As Fabrizio Gaggio, managing director of Lungarno Alberghi, puts it: 'It's about transferring the style of the family into the hotels. This is different from what other fashion houses are doing, who are just giving their names.'
Like the Medicis, the Ferragamos understand the subtlest nuances of the commercial transaction. 'Hotels represent extreme retailing, which is a natural extension of fashion,' says Leonardo. 'There is just one critical difference. With hotels, you present
your customers with a bill but they don't leave with an actual product in hand. In other words, there are no shoes in a shopping bag. All they've got to take away with them is the memory of an experience. It's a hotelier's job to make sure that memory is the very best, so they come back for more.' What is conspicuous and deliberate about the Lungarno hotels is the fact that each is different. 'We don't replicate hotels like a photocopier,' says Leonardo. 'Each has to have its own personality.'
Training a team of dedicated Lungarno staff has not been straightforward. 'It's
the most difficult, time-consuming thing to transfer your vision to your staff,' says Fabrizio. For the Ferragamos, this 'vision' means an easy-going professionalism, a modern mix that puts their close-knit family approach to hotels at one remove from the more formal school of hospitality. 'To achieve this, it's better to work with virgin staff. But there's a problem,' says Leonardo: 'in Italy, it's difficult to find a virgin.'
Nevertheless, Lungarno Alberghi looks set to grow and grow. 'Organically,' insists Fabrizio. 'It is the only way to do it, in order to create something like the rooms in a house and avoid it becoming a typical hotel.'
To this end, the Ferragamo family consistently work with the same architect-designer, Michele Bönan. 'When we started looking for someone, we wanted an expert who made homes. That way, we could make a hotel feel like a home,' says Leonardo. 'It is vital for us to have the vision of guests rather than of managers,' he says. 'This creates a different form of hospitality. To keep this perspective, I stay in our hotels. I come with my wife and we live in them; we see how they work.'
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