Milan | RossoSegnale

If you favour B&Bs for the personal touch, this one is awash in it. And if you adore the stories behind them, well, at RossoSegnale thy cup positively runneth over. In a previous life, in another home in another city, Alberto and Raoul lodged a whole touring theatre company more than once and loved it. By their own modest admission, it’s that fabled open-hearted hospitality of the folk from Emilia Romagna again. So inthis Milanese lifethey couldn’t resist doing up a tall turn-of-the-century house with its own back garden, jusy north-west of downtown near Piazzale Loreto, engaging floods of personal panache and then throwing open the doors to guests.

It has three super rooms, each with a balcony and a distinctive design theme and colour, and amenities you’d be hard put to find in a lot of smart hotels. They’ve mixed artworks and big-name design with vintage and curios picked up on their travels to create an utterly original cast of urban luxury – and that includes bathrooms and communal areas.

The house has a solarium-terrace up on high and lounge space on a mezzanine. The garden is to sit in, and at the bottom of it is a Scandinavian-style summer house with a mini gym and reading room. The old mechanic’s workshop on the ground floor is a gallery (3001 Lab) displaying the works of emerging talents patronised by our art-loving householders. And the signal red of the name is in splashes of colour here and there, not least the lift. The second B, needless to say, is just as stylishly presented, organic or selected from craft bakeries.