La Réserve Firenze

The one-bedroom apartment at La Réserve Firenze is bigger than one of the two-bedrooms: 175 square metres against the Piano Nobile's 170, with a separate dining room and frescoes in the lounge. It is an apartment for a couple who mean to have people to dinner. There are six, in Palazzo Segni, a fifteenth-century house on the corner of Via Santo Spirito and Via dei Coverelli, where the historian Bernardo Segni died in 1558. Gilles & Boissier have restored it for an October 2026 opening, putting travertine in the bathrooms and leaving the coffered, frescoed ceilings over the main bedrooms. At its middle is a patio of carved friezes and period columns round a stone fountain shaped like a lion's head. Every apartment has its own wine cellar, and housekeeping twice a day to clear up after it.

Recommended for families, or two couples sharing, who would rather keep house in the Oltrarno for a few days than check in to it. Breakfast is brought to the apartment. Santo Spirito is two minutes' walk, the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens six, and the concierge will book a historic barchetto on the Arno or a truffle hunt. Ask for the Santo Spirito View on the top floor, whose kitchen looks over the rooftops to the basilica's dome: Brunelleschi above the hob. A party of six takes the duplex, with 55 square metres of terrace and the whole city round it. The courtesy bar's terrace faces Santo Spirito and the Pitti, and the hotel prescribes a Negroni there at sunset, on the grounds that Florence invented it. There is no restaurant. Dinner is a private chef in the apartment's kitchen, or room service from Trattoria Cammillo: a Florentine trattoria making a house call, and charging for the trip.