Intimacy and warmth in the heart of Motor Valley

The so-called Motor Valley is an area of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region renowned worldwide for its motor industry, racing circuits, network of automotive museums and private collections and training centres. Right at its heart, in the town of Fiorano Modenese, stands the Executive Spa Hotel, recently restyled and remodelled by Gualtiero Sacchi’s design firm. This versatile and welcoming establishment is also open to non-resident guests and serves as an ideal base for exploring the many cultural initiatives and promotional events held in the area.
The hotel extends over six levels: three devoted to the 64 guest rooms (including five suites) and the others offering services and common areas that are also open to visitors who are not staying at the hotel. The entire building has a 1950s feel to it, and colour plays a very important role along with the choice of sophisticated materials and furnishings. The guest room levels each adopt a different colour (air force blue, stone and salmon), while the rooms are divided into groups with different fabrics, upholstery and wallpaper. The reception area, lobby, two restaurants, cocktail bar, breakfast room, reading room and spa all adopt highly varied and effective colour schemes thanks to a skilful combination of ceramic wall and floor tiles, furnishing fabrics, lighting, vintage and contemporary furniture and artworks.
“Ceramic tiles played a key role in this renovation project,” says Gualtiero Sacchi. “I wanted to create a sense of intimacy in these very large spaces, from the lobby to the spa. To achieve this, I installed a series of partitions throughout the hotel to delimit specific areas and allow the light fixtures to be positioned on the walls as part of a more elegant and domestic style lighting design. All these partitions are clad with large ceramic slabs, mostly with marble effects, although I tried to choose the individual marble varieties for their chromatic and graphic appeal rather than sense of realism. These large-size slabs were also used in all the bathrooms, where they coordinate effectively with the brass and gold finishes of the Flos light fittings, and gave a glamorous touch to the entire project. In the spa, inspired by the almost totally monochromatic look of travertine from Roman baths, I wanted to achieve a sensation of a uniform colour but with different textures, just like when working with marble with different cuts and finishes. This led to the decision to use the Sensi collection designed by Matteo Thun & Partners for Florim, which for each individual colour (in this case Taupe) offers a choice of surfaces with different levels of smoothness and relief. By combining the angled LED ceiling lighting with the floor spotlights, we gave a sense of movement to the walls and created an intimate and natural ambience. On the rooftop, the ceramic tiles had an exclusively decorative function. The choice of decorations from the Rilievi collection designed by Zaven for CEDIT (Florim) helped us decorate the resin walls, recreating a strong aesthetic impact thanks to the colour contrasts of forest green against brick and taupe against the air force blue walls.”