hospitalitystyle.com

(September 2008) posted on Thu Sep 11, 2008 EDT

Simone Micheli has stormed onto the international design stage with in-your-face creations where walls ripple, color-shifting lighting washes public spaces and ceilings are made of cement.

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Simone Micheli insists that incorporating the phrase "Architectural Hero" in his company's name wasn't an act of hubris. "I'm a street fighter," says Micheli. "Like many architects and designers, I'm constantly battling against stereotypes, politics and administrative problems to create new visions-kind of a modern day Orlando Furioso. I've never been willing to give up on my vision, so I spent a long time looking for clients before they started looking for me."

Consequently, it took Micheli nearly two decades to become an overnight sensation with his firm, Simone Micheli Architectural Hero s.r.l. His first hotel commission, Migros Group's Corte dei Butteri in the Tuscan city of Fonte-blanda, didn't happen until 1999, nine years after he launched his architectural firm. It
wasn't completed until 2003, the year he opened his design company. The University of Florence-trained architect added teaching, exhibition curating and consulting for manu-facturers such as Axia, Porcelanosa, Strato Cucine, Gruppo Industriale Busnelli, Adrenalina to his skill set while waiting for
the world to catch up to his thinking.

2007 marked a major contraction in the learning curve. Micheli and his 30-member team put the finishing touches on more than a half-dozen hospitality projects in Italy and Hungary within 12 months, and took home six international design awards as a result. With no slowdown in sight, he's leaving his outgrown office in Florence for larger quarters in the center of Italy's design world, Milan, in 2011.

Micheli credits "adventure mates" from hotel companies such as Switzerland's Migros and Italy's Boscolo Hotels for helping to establish his practice as one of the relatively few in Europe with a hospitality specialty. But it wasn't until entrepreneurs started crossing over into hotel investments from other fields that his portfolio hit its stride.

"They really saw the business opportunities for hotels that over-reach expectations," he says. "It's no longer a matter of whether the project has classic or modern style. Technology, new ways of handling spatial volume, working with materials that give visual movement to walls and floors-all of this is being synthesized into hotel, restaurant and spa design that changes hour by hour, minute by minute."