Six Senses Rome: Patricia Urquiola Gives Roman Materials a New Rhythm
At Six Senses Rome, the relationship between a city and an interior is built into the surfaces. Patricia Urquiola’s 2023 project for Palazzo Salviati Cesi Mellini draws on Roman stone, historic architectural details and the rituals of gathering around food and water. The result gives the hotel a recognisable local vocabulary while allowing its rooms to function as contemporary places to meet, rest and move through.
Urquiola’s studio identifies wellbeing, conviviality and the building’s history as the foundations of the design. Those ideas become more interesting when examined at close range: in a carved wall, the edge of a basin or the way a communal room opens towards daylight.
Stone with a specific Roman identity
Travertino Romano Classico and Verde Cipollino give the project its material centre. Stone supplier Margraf documents their use across reception, shared rooms, the restaurant and the spa. In the tepidarium, waterjet-cut laurel leaves form a relief in the travertine walls, referring to the story of Apollo and Daphne. Palladiana flooring brings green marble fragments into the composition.
These details make the historic reference tangible. Across the public rooms and spa, stone defines floors, wall surfaces, portals and basins. Its changing treatment establishes differences between spaces without abandoning the overall palette. A ribbed surface, a sculpted portal and a monolithic basin ask to be read at different distances.
A social room organised around daily life
The communal interiors use the open kitchen as an organising point. Reporting on the completed project, Interni describes a continuous restaurant arrangement, a central lounge and bar beneath the recovered roof, and a planted patio. Site-specific art, curated by Federica Sala, was considered alongside the interior design rather than added as a final decorative layer.
The arrangement is significant because the building’s grandeur could easily have imposed a formal sequence of reception rooms. Here, cooking, sitting and conversation give the public interiors a more ordinary rhythm. Historic architecture remains present, but people and activity supply the changing focus.
The quieter scale of the guest rooms
Agape’s project account records a palette of cream stone, warm reds, burnt orange and earth tones in the accommodation. In the bathrooms, black detailing outlines fluted glass and mirrors, introducing a precise graphic edge to the softer colours. The specified pieces include Urquiola’s Lariana basins, alongside Memory fittings and the Spoon XL bathtub, both by Benedini Associati.
This is a different register from the communal spaces. Smaller elements and controlled contrasts carry the design, showing how a project’s identity can survive the transition from a large shared room to a private bathroom without repeating the same gesture at every scale.
History as a working material
The restored staircase, classical proportions and planted interiors maintain a connection with the palazzo, while the furnishings and bathing spaces establish its present use. Within that framework, the sequence moves from large shared settings to carved surfaces and objects encountered at close range.
The open kitchen, stone reliefs and finely detailed bathrooms give these changes of scale different material registers. Travertine carries a connection to Rome through the project, yet its treatment varies with the room: flooring in one setting, a carved surface in another, and a precisely shaped basin elsewhere.
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