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"View Slideshow\n\nForty-five years ago, when Mary McCarthy was writing The Stones of Florence, she went to see an elderly Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, his villa outside town, and listened to him say of the city below, \"Nobody comes here anymore.\" This phrase supplied a melancholy leit-motif for the opening pages of her insightful portrait of Florence, a place, as she perceived it, that had fallen woefully out of fashion.\n\nAs just about any attentive traveler knows, fashion has embraced Florence in the intervening years, in high season (which is basically spring, summer and fall) perhaps a little too enthusiastically for its own good. Florence is a contained place: Cupped in a geographic bowl and built, in the centro storico anyway, to the absolute plausible limit, the city can absorb more visitors only by looking within, finding and reimagining existing buildings and coming up with ways to give them new life.\n\nThis is precisely the approach that has been taken by the Lungarno Alberghi group, a hotel management company headed by the Salvatore Ferragamo group that now operates four hotels in Florence: Hotel Lungarno, Gallery Hotel Art, Continentale and Lungarno Suites. All are clustered near the storied Ponte Vecchio; all have been designed by Florence-based architect Michele Bnan; and all are contained in fairly mediocre postwar buildings that he has revived with a freshness and a brio that are uncommon on the Florentine hotel scene, where the classical and the nostalgic have long been deeply entrenched.\n\nThe buildings stand on sites bombed by the German army during the Second World War, hence their incongruous modernity in the otherwise impeccably period cityscape. But it was just this incongruity that brought out in Bnan a kind of looseness that might never have come to the surface if he had been working with a Renaissance or ottocento palazzo: \"The buildings, to be quite frank, had no inherent beauty whatsoever,\" Bnan declares. \"What they did have was amazing locations, incomparable views and decent enough proportions. Also, there's a sort of pent-up energy that comes from being right in the middle of, though aesthetically rather apart from, the epicenter of Renaissance culture. I like to think that I helped to set this energy free.\"\n\nBnan explains that each hotel has a different personality, \"just like my children.\" Hotel Lungarno, the first he designed and the only one on the Oltrarno, is the most traditional. Gallery Hotel Art, which mounts regular exhibitions of paintings and photography, caters, perhaps not surprisingly, to an art-world clientele. With swank, graphic black, white and pink interiors, Continentale set out to pay homage to Salvatore Ferragamo and the golden age of Italian couture and thereby to attract visiting fashionistas, while Lungarno Suites, with its generous spaces and range of domestic conveniences, is meant to appeal to the longer-term visitor or people traveling with families.\n\nAs the name suggests, the suites are small apartments, each with a sitting room, a galley kitchen and one (or in a few cases two) bedrooms. Seven suites have terraces from which a guest with a strong throwing arm could probably play catch with the statue of Benvenuto Cellini that stands amid the shops of gold sellers on the Ponte Vecchio; the 14th-century bridge, the only one spared during the 1944 bombing, is so close that even when the curtains are drawn, it still seems to be part of the view or, by then, a visitor's inner eye.\n\nBnan's goal for Lungarno Suites was to create apartments that come with all the comforts of a hotel. Room service and housekeeping are impeccable: Guests can even fill out a shopping list and have groceries delivered to their private kitchens (one visitor, early on, requesting tomatoes, neglected to specify the quantity\u2014and received an entire carton, enough to make a gallon of marinara). While there is no lobby to speak of, only a modest reception desk reached by way of a short alley off the Lungarno Acciaiuoli, guests are welcome to use the public rooms of any of the other nearby hotels, among them the sleek Fusion Bar at Gallery Hotel Art, which is maybe 30 passi (or steps) away.\n\nThe suites themselves divide into two colorways: The lucky group that faces the Arno is fitted out in a rich aquamarine, while the likable (if darker) group that faces an inner court tends toward the coral. Bnan's modernism, though spare and cerebral, is far from cold: Draperies are allowed to pool; rugs soften the floor; sofas wear boldly piped slipcovers; and mirror frames are covered in silver gilt. \"In imagining this hotel, I thought of the contemporary; I thought of New York,\" he explains. \"I wanted something that was rational, clean, essential. These concepts also suggest, to me, an Asian influence, and when I could, I introduced a subtle one into the interiors.\"\n\nIndeed, shoji-like sliding doors of wood and glass separate the bedroom from the sitting room/kitchen. Furniture on both sides is confident, bold, masculine\u2014and always a Bnan design. Kitchens are fully equipped and intentionally integrated into the sitting rooms. While they can be closed off behind louvered paneled doors, they clearly belong to the room: The wood floor continues, and the cabinets are solid and handsome\u2014one in each suite even has a trademark Bnan clock built into its door.\n\nClearly, Michele Bnan knows that time tugs at a visitor to Florence, as in most cities whose florescence is magnificent yet contained and rooted in the distant past. Nowadays time in Florence inevitably feels too limited, given how much there is to absorb and to understand. By taking an undistinguished postwar office building and turning it into a serene cluster of apartments by the Arno, Bnan and his clients at the Lungarno Alberghi group seem to have recognized that people do come here now, and like to linger."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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