Hotel Locarno, Rome

I'd known about the Locarno for years before I ever booked it - filed away the way you file away a place you've decided you'll get to eventually, without much urgency behind the decision. What moved it up the list was a tailor in Sydney, who brought it up unprompted, halfway through a jacket fitting, in the same unhurried way you'd mention a restaurant you don't want to see get busier. I recognised him instantly as a fellow aesthete - not from anything he said about hotels, but from the way he talked about cloth, the particular attention of someone who can't help noticing things properly regardless of what's in front of him. That was enough. We booked the Locarno for our honeymoon on the strength of a recommendation about nothing more than the way a man discussed lapels.

They put us in the Doge suite. I remember the walls so vividly - a red so deep it read almost black by lamplight, flock wallpaper raised in a pattern you had to run your hand across. It felt less like a hotel room than somebody's living room, if that somebody had very good, very loud taste.

I learned the history afterward, the way you do with places that get under your skin before you've found the inclination to understand them. The Locarno opened in 1925, a Swiss family's tribute to the home they'd left, and spent the war first under Nazi occupation and then American, coming out the other side closer to ruin than hotel. It would likely have stayed that way if Maria Teresa Celli hadn't fallen for a half-floor of it in the 1970s and spent years buying back the rest, restoring the Art Nouveau detail rather than replacing it. Her daughter runs it now. Fellini was one of the regulars, back when the hotel was a byword for a certain kind of Roman bohemia. Somewhere in the building, in Room 605, Wes Anderson is said to have written his treatment for The Grand Budapest Hotel - a piece of trivia I only picked up much later, and have never quite managed to separate from the memory of that red room, even though I never set foot in his.

We've been back several times since, and I don't explain it as loyalty. It's that the history never announces itself - nothing roped off, nothing captioned, no card on the pillow about who used to sit where - and yet you feel it the moment you're inside. What's strange is that none of it reads as dated. The Locarno hasn't updated itself to seem current. It just never got old, and somehow that makes it feel more contemporary than anywhere trying harder to be.

There's a version of that same feeling we try to bring home with us - nothing chasing trend, just a room that holds its own atmosphere. Shop our home fragrance.