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BYBLOS ART HOTEL VILLA AMISTA |
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VERONA, ITALY
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For design groupies, the Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà is paradise. Staying there is like living in a museum of modern furniture without the guide ropes. Dino Facchini, whose family owns the Byblos fashion label, bought the ruined villa, seven kilometres from Verona, in 1999 and restored it to its baroque splendour; then he got architect Alessandro Mendini to blueprint a hotel that lets guests loose in a work of art. Even the hippest hotels rely upon mass-produced furniture to take the wear and tear of everyday hotel life. But not here. No two pieces are the same and each is labelled and listed just as in a museum. You can lounge in a Proust armchair by Mendini (on permanent display at both the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein and New York's MoMA) and put your feet up on Mae West's lips by Salvador Dalí. The art is as good as the furniture: you can check e-mails under the watchful gaze of Cindy Sherman's 'Clown' series; and scattered throughout the hotel are works by Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Vanessa Beecroft and Peter Halley. Even place settings in the restaurant are collectors' items, with silverware by Sabatier and cutlery by Giò Ponti. Some of the objects designed exclusively for the hotel have been made into a Byblos Casa collection and can be bought on site. The spa, under the fashionable French brand of Henri & Dominique Chenot, offers massages, mud treatments and hydrotherapy in a mosaic-lined building.
WHEN TO GO
From May, when temperatures climb to 20°C. Or book for Verona's opera season, which begins on 24 June.
ROOM TO BOOK
Room 50, the Byblos Suite.
CONTACT
Via Cedrate 78, Corrubbio di Negarine, Verona, Italy (00 39 045 685 5555; www.villamista.com).
COST
Doubles from 270 euros; suites from 600 euros
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