Hotel Ancora, Renzo Rosso’s love letter to the Dolomites
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
History hangs in the air in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The little ski village with big cachet in Italy’s Dolomites was for much of the past four centuries under Habsburg rule, effectively making it part of Austro-Hungary. Even Venice ceded to the Kingdom of Italy before Cortina did, in 1866. Who’s to say whether that hybrid provenance – Austro-Hungarian gentility, Italian élan – is what made it an epicentre of Euro glamour; but it’s been a fixture on the jet-set map for the past 120 years, its popularity the happy by-product of the exceptional ski territory that surrounds it. (The après scene that those excellent pistes has begotten only adds to its appeal.)
These days the Dolomites are as much a summer destination as a winter one; the slopes and valleys around Cortina are replete with walking and biking trails, vie ferrate for the mountaineers (or cable cars for the spectators), and icy glacial lakes for bracing open-water swims. The town’s main drag, the Corso Italia, glitters with the expected roster of designer boutiques and bustling cafés. But it is the excess of natural beauty here that first captivated Renzo Rosso. Love struck hard for the founder of Diesel and chairman of OTB Group, which owns Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander among other luxury brands. Instead of a chalet, he bought a hotel: the 199-year-old Ancora, which had been owned by four generations of the same family, though shuttered since 2003. It has just reopened after a meticulous renovation.
“If I’m honest, I have always been more of a seaside person,” Rosso says. “But the spectacle here, the 360-degree nature of it – it’s the most beautiful mountain range in the world. You walk or cycle out of the town in any season, and every kilometre that passes, there’s a more gorgeous view.”
This isn’t Rosso’s first foray into hospitality: in 1990 he bought the Pelican Hotel, a listed art deco landmark in Miami Beach, renovating it along multichromatic lines that played well both on the boardwalk and the social scene. In Cortina he’s hoping for a similar success, and his timing is fortuitous: the arrival of the 2026 Winter Olympics (which will be staged between here and Milan) means “the Pearl of the Dolomites” will be back on the international radar.
Rosso enlisted an accomplished cohort to help him balance 21st-century upgrades with fealty to Ancora’s old-world character. Aldo Melpignano, whose portfolio includes the dreamy Puglian destination resort Borgo Egnazia, is in charge of operations. Longtime Soho House design director Vicky Charles has overseen the interior renovation, in her first hotel project since leaving her former role to set up shop as an independent designer.
“For me, what made this whole journey appealing was that Renzo intended to treat it very much as a restoration project,” says Charles. “With this hotel there was just so much to work with; the joinery and woodwork, the painted ceilings, alpine decorative motifs, the colours. It has a really strong aesthetic language, and so much originality. And then in this stroke of kismet I have my second office in [the Veneto city of] Bassano del Grappa – which Renzo actually didn’t know when we met, but which worked out brilliantly.”
“Obviously Vicky has all of the Soho House credibility, but what I liked best is the ways in which she’s creative,” says Rosso of the collaboration. “How she responded to the history by bringing in so much vintage furniture and lighting, how she knew how to manage every single room being different. We went everywhere together looking for the paintings; we scoured the fairs for lights.”
The result is a 35-key house hotel that thoughtfully folds its original quirks and idiosyncrasies into a fresh vision of luxury. In signature alpine style, many of the beds were tucked into niches – a conceit that Charles loved, and retained, lining several of them with fabric-effect wallpapers. Soft silk carpet reprises the original slate-blue or dove-grey paintwork that adorns the mouldings and cornices. Padded headboards, side chairs and low sofas are upholstered in gleaming silk-velvet, the furniture skirted with ropes of passementerie. Sliding doors separate bathroom from bedroom in the suites: “When they’re open, you can watch your TV from the tub,” notes Charles. “That kind of experience is a real part of the sense of your room being a sanctuary that Renzo wanted. Apart from being someone with a really clear vision, he’s extremely well-travelled – he’s stayed in the best hotels in the world, so he had lots of ideas about all of those more operational details.”
Hints of Rosso’s own flamboyant persona make themselves felt here and there as well: “ENJOY! xxx”, his habitual correspondence sign-off, adorns tilework on the sides of bathtubs. But “none of it’s bold, none of it’s loud”, says Charles. “Even the red we use – Renzo’s colour – is a softer terracotta red. It just wouldn’t have fit otherwise. Anyone who’s creative is colour-literate, and he’s definitely no exception.”
Downstairs, the restoration reaches its most charming expression; the bar’s original peach-hued marble columns were “a case of those marvellous ‘in-the-way’ original elements that you just work with,” says Charles – ones which then become seminal, intuitive parts of the whole. The original fireplace was likewise reopened; in the breakfast room, the stunning hand-painted gilt motifs on the ceiling have been meticulously filled in and restored.
Melpignano is Rosso’s comrade in quality service, meanwhile, having put the staff through their training paces and ensuring the timely arrival to the kitchens each morning of fresh produce. Despite Cortina’s burnish of glamour, Rosso feels it could be more – that its status as a genuine international destination is yet to be made. “We want it to be everything it has the potential to be,” he says – spring, summer, autumn and winter – with the Hotel Ancora, and its fresh face, ready to receive the curious all year round.
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