Inside JK Place, Rome’s Most Stylish Boutique Hotel

Michele Bönan’s hotels are cozy, but strategically jolt guests with the unexpected surprise—conveyed with a Technicolor palette that is as bold as the work of any contemporary painter. At JK Place Rome, a boutique hotel that opened last year in an ornate 19th-century building near the Borghese Palace, Bönan contrasts brick red leather chairs with teal, a popular color also used on guest room walls. Bönan’s company mixes its own paint colors to ensure the precise tonal harmony that energizes instead of disturbs.

Contemporary pieces fill the lobby in Rome’s JK Place.

The furniture—which his company also creates—is contemporary and angular, favoring la dolce vita mid-century influences. Anchoring all his designs is a respect for disciplined structure; not surprising, considering he was a trained as an architect before becoming an interior designer. Those who follow Bönan’s work look for his signature wing chairs, geometric touches in lighting fixtures and fabrics, soaring canopy beds, as well as classical Roman busts proudly sharing spaces with contemporary art. At JK Place Rome—there are sister hotels in Capri and Florence—Massimo Listri’s print interpretations of historic spaces fill the room. A large painting by the Italian mid-century modernist Franco Ferrari is in the hotel’s main greeting room. At JK Place, Bönan is happy to bridge classicism with modern austerity, harking back to those Italian roots flowing through his veins like a Chianti Classico. Simplicity, irony, and glamour are his mantras.

Rich shades of teal and garnet contrast with the guest room furnishings.

It’s a tribute to his celebrated genius that the owners of the three JK Place hotels sought Bönan’s artistry even though he was associated with the Ferragamo family, who had already enlisted him to design hotels in their Lungarno chain. But hotelier Ori Kafri, brought up in Florence, and his Israeli merchant father, Jonathan Kafri—thus JK Place—recognized talent and knew he would interpret their five-star hotels in a fresh way. In fact, Bönan has so successfully reimagined Rome, Capri, and Florence at its greatest that people flock to see the hotels while visiting Michelangelo sculptures and Caravaggio masterpieces. In Italy, art and design are sacred, and embraced wherever beautifully achieved.