Hotel Principe di Savoia

The Hotel

The Hotel Principe di Savoia opened on Piazza della Repubblica in 1927. The square had been laid out a decade earlier on the site of the medieval Porta Nuova city gate, and the Principe was conceived as the grand hotel for the new northern entrance to central Milan: a nine-storey Lombard Renaissance block facing the Stazione Centrale axis, with a heavy travertine facade, a double-height marble lobby, and 1,100 staff at opening. The property was the booking of choice for the prewar industrial bourgeoisie, the postwar political class, and the international fashion business from the early 1980s on. In 2003 the building was acquired by the Brunei royal family and folded into Dorchester Collection, joining the Dorchester in London, the Plaza Athenee in Paris, and the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. The Dorchester operating standard has remained in place since.

The hotel runs 257 rooms and 44 suites across nine floors. The room product was last comprehensively refreshed across 2017 to 2019 under interior designer Thierry Despont (the Dorchester group's house architect of the period), with a calibrated reading of the 1920s Lombard interior: walnut panelling, silk damask wall finishes in cream and dove grey, deep marble bathrooms with a separate tub and shower in nearly every category, and the property's trademark mosaic floors restored in the corridors. The Deluxe categories at 35 to 40 square metres are the property's base case; the Junior Suites at 65 square metres and the Ambassador Suites at 90 square metres are the right categories for a serious business stay. The rooftop Presidential Suite, at 500 square metres across the entire ninth floor with a private outdoor pool over the cathedral skyline, is one of three suites of its kind in any European hotel and remains the booking of last resort for visiting Hollywood and Premier League royalty.

The dining and beverage offer has been the property's quietly improving asset over the past five years. Acanto, the signature restaurant under chef Alessandro Buffolino, runs a modernised Italian menu in an Empire-style room with a private courtyard for warm-weather seating; it is the only Dorchester restaurant in Italy and the menu reads accordingly. Il Salotto, the lobby tea room, is the most ceremonial afternoon tea in Milan. The Principe Bar, run by Ettore Diana, is the city's most consistently good cocktail room and a fixture of the Fashion Week and Salone calendars. The wellness floor on level eight runs an 18-metre indoor pool under a vaulted skylight, a hammam, a Finnish sauna, and ten treatment rooms operating under the Club 10 banner with a treatment menu built around Sisley, La Mer, and the Principe's own product line.

Service is the property's deepest moat. The Dorchester operating personality, formal in posture, warm in execution, and unfailingly memory-driven, runs deeper here than at most of the group's European houses. The team is long-tenured (the door staff and concierges average 22 years of service), the front office is fluent in seven languages, and the property holds a member of Les Clefs d'Or on every shift. For a business traveller, the Principe is the only Milan hotel with the operational depth to handle a 150-person board lunch and a private CEO dinner in parallel without either side feeling secondary. Location is the soft edge: Piazza della Repubblica is the business-and-fashion axis rather than the cathedral or the historic centre, and the Duomo is fifteen minutes' walk or three stops on the metro yellow line.

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