Duomo Hotel

A peaceful seaside resort

Rimini is an Italian seaside resort on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Its 15 kilometers of fine sand beaches and its numerous tourist infrastructures make it a highly popular destination. Excessive urbanization has led to the construction of fairly unattractive concrete structures, although they do not seem to have hurt the success of Rimini. It’s one of Europe’s largest beach resorts with 1,300 hotels, and an abundance of bars and clubs. This modernization has created a tendency to forget the city’s past whose historical center attests to its importance throughout history. Founded by the Romans in 268 B.C., conquered by Caesar after crossing the Rubicon, it has always been a strategic site. It is also an important part of Dante’s classic, “The Inferno”. It was therefore in the heart of Rimini, on a typically Italian narrow street, that the free spirited international designer, Ron Arad, known for his contemporary creations, took over a hotel in order to totally transform it. It was the first hotel created by the Israeli design genius…a first and masterful stroke.

An off the wall design by a renowned contemporary creative artist

“Some people think you should feel at home in a hotel, but I think that if you want to feel at home, stay there!” Ron Arad’s concept is clear: make a hotel stay a unique experience, something out of the ordinary. In remaining faithful to his formalist obsessions, we find in the Duomo Hotel his love for sinusoidal shapes, ellipses and ovals exploited with great success. Ron Arad takes great pleasure, as an independent creator, navigating, according to his desires, between design, plastic arts and architecture. The rounded shapes shock and charm at the same time. The fiber optical lighting underscores the ultra-contemporary side of the project, and the impression of diving into another world begins at the reception area designed as a giant ring balanced against a column, giving the perfect impression of fragility and vacillation.

The 43 rooms and suites are spread over three floors, each with its own color code. A bit less off the wall, in appearance only, in the decoration of the rooms, Arad offers a clearly defined space where the pod type bathroom, elegant and minimalist, reflects the notion of intimacy that the designer managed to include in spite of the ultra contemporary concept of the project. Created with a young and yuppy clientele in mind, the Duomo Hotel has a multitude of little eccentricities which delight visitors in search of the unusual. The rooms for example, don’t have mini-bars, but there’s a beverage machine on each floor to encourage guests to mix with one another, and to perhaps have a drink later on in the hotel bar and end the evening at the city’s most “in” address, the Nomi Club.

The hotel’s creator sums up his concept of the hotel when he describes it as “a club with rooms”.

The opening of the renovated and redesigned Duomo Hotel in 2006 was a long awaited event since some people were skeptical about Ron Arad’s ability to adapt his design concepts to the demands of a hotel.