On Via de' Tornabuoni, one of Florence’s grandest streets, Stella d’Italia occupies the upper floors of a palazzo whose history is still part of its present life. The first floor remains home to Il Circolo dell’Unione, a private club founded in the nineteenth century around the circle of Anatolio Demidoff, Prince of San Donato, and later known as the Jockey Club. Above it, Stella d’Italia has taken shape in the former Hotel Scoti, with interiors by creative director Matteo Perduca and a personal touch from co-owner Betty Soldi, a designer and calligrapher.

The corridors feel less like hotel passageways than the walls of a private collection. Twentieth-century portraits and still lifes hang beside abstract compositions, framed books and lengths of African fabric. Here and there, fragments of the original frescoes remain exposed in the plaster. The rooms follow the same instinct for juxtaposition: carpets in saturated yellow, green and blue, freestanding bathtubs placed directly in the bedrooms, painted wainscoting and furniture drawn from different decades of the last century. Nothing seems bound to a single period or style; the rooms find their character in the mix.

Breakfast is served in the Salone, where eighteenth-century frescoes stretch across the walls, depicting an imagined Tuscan countryside. Next door, the bar has its own collection: hand-painted Buon Ricordo plates, the souvenirs Italian restaurants have given their guests since the 1960s. Above, a furnished loggia opens onto the rooftops of Florence, with the hills beyond.

There is no restaurant, but little reason to miss one here. Palazzo Strozzi is just around the corner, the Arno lies beyond Santa Trinita, and the Duomo, the Uffizi and the streets of the Oltrarno are all within walking distance. Back at the palazzo, the pleasure is in returning to a house that feels assembled rather than designed, with the accumulated character of somewhere that has lived several lives.