Hospitality

On 11 March 2026 the Praça do Comércio acquired a new tenant, and the Patricia Urquiola Andaz Lisbon opened its doors at R. do Comércio 132 — a 170-key conversion by Patricia Urquiola for Hyatt’s Andaz lifestyle brand, with Lisbon practice Moerschel Arquitectos as architect of record. It is Hyatt’s first Andaz in Portugal, the first opening since the brand’s refresh, and the sixth hotel in a Urquiola lineage that already runs through Lake Como, Milan, Rome and Knightsbridge. The Baixa address overlooks the Tagus from the river edge of the 18th-century Pombaline grid; the building itself is older than the hotel and considerably older than the lifestyle category it has been enrolled into. What Urquiola has done is a reading rather than a rebuild. ...

On 14 May 2026 the navy Burberry check went up on the sun loungers, parasols and deck chairs of the Hôtel Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins, signage reading “Burberry Cap d’Antibes” screwed to the jetty, and the fashion hotel takeovers 2026 calendar acquired its loudest summer chapter. Daniel Lee, chief creative officer at Burberry since September 2022, is the named author; the Estène-Chauvin family, who have run the 43-room Art Deco hotel since Boma and Simone Estène bought Villa Saint-Louis in 1929 and opened it as Hôtel Belles Rives in 1930, are the hosts. The residency runs to 30 September 2026 and arrives in a year already crowded with houses moving into hospitality real estate: Loro Piana’s Casa Brera in Milan, Tom Dixon’s Mua Mua at Mulino Estate, Hermès at Capella Kyoto, and the Chanel Cruise show at Casino Municipal de Biarritz. The pattern is not a coincidence. ...

Capella Kyoto, opened in spring 2026 by Kengo Kuma & Associates on the site of a former elementary school in Miyagawa-cho, is the most fully realised expression yet of Kuma’s argument that a hotel can be made by applying machiya wisdom — smallness, layered roofs, inner courtyards — at 89 rooms. It is the Capella brand’s Japan debut, the third Kuma-designed structure clustered in this corner of Higashiyama, and a building that asks to be read against the grain of contemporary Japanese architecture — against Tadao Ando’s concrete monasticism, SANAA’s diagrammatic lightness, and Junya Ishigami’s atmospheric near-absence — as an argument for craft, depth, and the slow accretion of small material decisions. ...

There is a long tradition of designers staging domestic vignettes at Milan Design Week — the aspirational living room, the fantasy kitchen, the bedroom that exists only as a backdrop for a new lamp. Tom Dixon has never been particularly interested in fantasy. At the Mulino Estate, a 1929 complex designed by Chiodi and Gio Ponti for the Sordelli family, Dixon and his Design Research Studio have done something more committed than a vignette: they’ve built an actual hotel. The objects on view here are not waiting to be photographed. They are waiting to be slept on, sat in, switched off at two in the morning by a guest who paid for the room. ...

The fashion takeover of Milan Design Week tends to follow a formula: find a palazzo, stage an installation, serve cocktails, leave. The results range from spectacular to cynical, but they share a trait — they are temporary. The space returns to normal by Monday. The fashion brand moves on. Marni’s approach this year is different, and it is the most genuinely delightful fashion project of the week precisely because it refuses the temporary. The OTB-owned house has taken over Pasticceria Cucchi — a Milanese café that has occupied the same corner of Corso Genova since 1936 — for a three-month residency running from 20 April through 15 July 2026. This is not a pop-up. It is a relationship, conducted in public, on a working café’s working hours, with a pastry counter that still has to function before 8am for the people who live across the street. ...