La Réserve Firenze: a palazzo of one's own on Via Santo Spirito

Six apartments, a roof terrace looking across to Brunelleschi's church and room service from Trattoria Cammillo. Michel Reybier's first Italian address opens on 16 October, and on paper it is the most interesting place to stay in Florence this autumn.

Via Santo Spirito is my favourite street in Florence, and the one that reminds me the city still belongs, in part, to Florentines. It runs along the Oltrarno a block back from the river, a narrow run of pietra forte and faded ochre plaster where furniture restorers work with their doors open, bookbinders keep irregular hours and the wine bars are too small to bother with a sign. The Uffizi crowds thin out the moment you cross the Ponte Santa Trinita, and by the time you reach the church of Santo Spirito you can hear swifts rather than tour guides.

It is a telling choice of address for La Réserve. Michel Reybier's small collection, which takes in La Réserve Paris, La Réserve Genève, La Réserve Ramatuelle and the Eden au Lac in Zurich, has always favoured discretion over spectacle, and its first property in Italy is the most private version of the idea yet: a 15th-century palazzo at number 6, divided into just six apartments with full hotel service, opening on 16 October after a summer of delays (the original date was June).

The palazzo

Olivia and Grégory Marciano bought the building in 2022 and spent the next few years restoring it with Reybier and the decorating duo Gilles & Boissier, best known for the Baccarat hotel in New York. Their signature is a slightly French reading of grand old buildings, all dark lacquer, burnished brass and good linen played against whatever the architecture already offers, and here the architecture offers a great deal. Several apartments keep their original frescoed ceilings, and the photographs show the designers have had the sense to leave them alone and keep the furniture low and quiet beneath them.

The apartments are generous by any measure, let alone Florence's. The smallest, the two-bedroom on the piano nobile, runs to 170 square metres, and the one-bedroom with frescoes is 175, which is roughly the size of a London family house given to two people. There are two-bedroom apartments with frescoes at 205 and 210 square metres, another two-bedroom looking over towards Santo Spirito, and at the top of the building a three-bedroom duplex for six with a 55 square metre private terrace and a view that takes in the whole city. Its main bedroom looks out over the Arno. If I were booking with family or friends, that is the one I would fight for.

Each apartment has its own kitchen, dining and sitting rooms, so this is a place to live in for a week or a month rather than a hotel bedroom with a mini fridge. The bathrooms come with deep tubs and rain showers, Dyson dryers and Nespresso machines, and every apartment has a yoga mat and weights, which tells you something about the guest they have in mind.

A house to share

The shared spaces are where La Réserve Firenze starts to feel like a private house rather than a serviced flat. There is a library, a games room with a billiard table, backgammon and chess, a gym fitted out with Technogym and Pent equipment, and a shaded internal patio planted thickly enough to keep the July heat at bay. The roof terrace, which faces Santo Spirito and the Pitti Palace, has a courtesy bar, and the team makes rather a point of the fact that the Negroni was invented a few streets away (at Caffè Casoni, in 1919, according to the story everyone in Florence tells). There is also a secret bar tucked away inside the palazzo, and I shall leave you to find the door for yourselves.

How the service works

This is the part that interests me most, because serviced apartments so often promise the best of both worlds and deliver the loneliness of a rental with the bill of a hotel. Here the list of what is included is long and specific: a concierge on duty round the clock, a maître de maison overseeing the house, housekeeping twice a day, laundry, grocery delivery and breakfast brought to your apartment each morning. Each apartment has its own wine cellar stocked with a selection of bottles (paid for separately), and given that Reybier owns Château Cos d'Estournel in Saint-Estèphe, I would expect that selection to be worth exploring. A private chef, butler, personal trainer, yoga teacher, masseur and babysitter can all be arranged, as can tennis on a private court somewhere in the city.

The cleverest detail is room service from Trattoria Cammillo. Anyone who knows Florence will understand why that matters. Cammillo, on Borgo San Jacopo, has been feeding the Oltrarno since the 1940s, and its white-jacketed waiters and fried artichokes are about as far from hotel food as it is possible to get. La Réserve has worked with the family on a menu for guests, which means you can stay in on a rainy November night and still eat as the city does. My one quibble is the delivery charge on top, which feels mean-spirited at this level, and I was surprised to see the breakfast billed as American. In a palazzo a short walk from some of the best bakeries in Florence, I would rather wake to a warm schiacciata and a cornetto from down the road.

There is no restaurant and no spa, and it would be wrong to come expecting either. Treatments come to you, dinner comes from Cammillo or from your own kitchen, and the rest of Florence is on the doorstep. Guests who want a lobby, a scene and a bar full of strangers should book elsewhere; the Portrait on the Lungarno or the Four Seasons in the Gherardesca gardens will suit them better.

The neighbourhood

The Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens are five minutes' walk away, the Ponte Vecchio a little more, and the Uffizi and the Duomo are an easy stroll across the river. The more compelling reason to stay here, though, is the Oltrarno itself. Mornings mean the small market in Piazza Santo Spirito, where you can buy produce for the kitchen upstairs, and evenings mean an aperitivo on the steps of the church as the façade turns pink. Further west lies San Frediano, which has the best of the city's newer restaurants and wine bars and still very few visitors who are not staying nearby.

You need not go far for dinner. Trattoria Angiolino, a little further along Via Santo Spirito, is one of the restaurants Florentines themselves are most loyal to, cooking generous, properly Italian food and serving it with a warmth that has you feeling known by the second night. Cammillo has the history and the white jackets, but Angiolino is where the neighbours go, and I would book a table there for the first evening.

One practical note for light sleepers: the piazza is lively late into the night, particularly at weekends and in summer. Number 6 sits towards the river end of the street, so it should be spared the worst of it, but it is worth asking which way your bedroom faces when you book.

Is it worth it?

Rates are not published and will be firmly in the territory of the city's best suites, so the honest answer depends on who is travelling. For a couple on a three-night city break, a hotel with a restaurant and a bar might be the better use of the money. For a family, a group of friends, or anyone planning to spend a week or more in Florence and wanting to shop at the market, cook a little, read on the terrace and live for a while in a Renaissance palazzo with someone else making the beds twice a day, I cannot think of anything else in the city quite like it. Reybier's hotels are known for getting the small things right, and the early signs here, from the Cammillo menu to the decision to leave the frescoes in peace, suggest he has understood what makes the Oltrarno worth crossing the river for.

The details

La Réserve Firenze, Via Santo Spirito 6, 50125 Florence. Opens 16 October 2026. Six apartments of one to three bedrooms, sleeping two to six. Rates on request. Telephone +39 055 288 082; lareserve-firenze.com