Four Seasons Hotel Milano

Via Gesù is a short street of palazzi running between Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga, and nothing on its facade announces that Four Seasons Hotel Milano stands behind number 6. The surprise comes inside: a cloister of the fifteenth century, planted as a garden, around which the hotel was built when it opened in 1993.

History

The building began as a convent, founded in the fifteenth century on what was then the edge of the city, and the cloister with its columns and arcades dates from that period. The nuns were gone by the eighteenth century, when the property was broken up into private residences and stables, and the cloister was built over and forgotten for two hundred years. The conversion for Four Seasons in the early 1990s uncovered the arcades, fragments of fresco under later plaster and the vaulted ground-floor rooms, and the hotel opened in 1993 as the group's first in Italy, fifteen years before its Florence hotel opened in 2008.

Architecture and design

The cloister is the centre of the plan. Its four arcades enclose a garden courtyard that serves as the hotel's outdoor dining room in summer, and the bedrooms occupy the former convent wings and a later block along Via Gesù. Traces of fresco survive in the lobby vaults and in several suites, left visible and framed by plain walls. The interiors have been renewed more than once since 1993, most recently with a lighter palette, Italian fabrics and furniture by Milanese makers, but the arcades, the vaults and the column capitals are the fifteenth-century originals.

Rooms and suites

The rooms are spread over the convent wings and the street block, so that some look into the cloister garden and others onto Via Gesù. Ceilings are high on the lower floors, and several suites keep fresco fragments or beamed ceilings from the convent. The largest suites, on the upper floors, have terraces over the courtyard. The count is modest for a Four Seasons, which is part of the hotel's appeal in a city of larger grand hotels.

Dining

The restaurant and bar open onto the cloister, with tables under the arcades and in the garden through the warm months and a dining room with a fireplace for winter. The kitchen cooks Italian food with Milanese and Lombard dishes on the menu, and the bar is a meeting place for the fashion houses whose offices surround the hotel. Breakfast is served in the courtyard when the weather allows.

Wellness

The spa occupies the vaulted lower floor with an indoor pool, a sauna, a steam room, treatment rooms and a fitness centre, built into the former cellars of the convent.

Weddings and events

The cloister garden is the hotel's wedding setting, used for ceremonies and dinners under the arcades, and the vaulted rooms on the ground floor take receptions and meetings. Fashion week fills the hotel with presentations and dinners twice a year. Capacities are modest and suited to private weddings rather than large banquets.

Location

The hotel stands in the Quadrilatero della Moda, the block of streets that holds Milan's fashion houses. Via Montenapoleone is at one end of Via Gesù, Via della Spiga at the other. La Scala and the Duomo are ten minutes on foot, the Pinacoteca di Brera about the same. Montenapoleone station on the M3 metro line is two minutes away. Linate airport is about 20 minutes by car, Malpensa about 50 minutes or 45 by train to Cadorna. Among luxury hotels in Milan it is the one with a garden at its heart, which is rarer than it sounds in this city.