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Above: In the living room, an Alligator sofa and custom cocktail table, both by Achille Salvagni, face a painting by Jack Penny; a vintage Pierre Guariche floor lamp adds a midcentury note.
Rome had gone quiet when Dutch journalist Paola van Dam got a phone call from her real-estate agent. It was early in the pandemic, when the city’s usual machinery—scooters whizzing down side streets, tourists spilling across piazzas, waiters pulling tables into the sun—had slowed. An apartment was available in Piazza di Spagna, the agent told her. Would she like to see it?
Of course she would. Van Dam had been looking for a place in the center of the city, somewhere she and her husband could escape to on weekends from their home in Tuscany. But that felt more like a fantasy than reality. “Piazza di Spagna was a dream location,” she says. “I didn’t really think it was going to happen.” Then came another surprise: The apartment belonged to a friend of her mother-in-law’s, a home van Dam had admired from afar. She and her husband bought it that same day.
Adrian Gaut
The apartment overlooks the Piazza di Spagna, with direct views of the Trinità dei Monti steps.
The apartment occupies the top floor of a historic building overlooking the Spanish Steps, with Chanel’s flagship below, and the Trinità dei Monti rising just beyond the windows. It is the sort of location so embedded in the collective imagination of Rome that one might reasonably wonder how to live there without feeling swallowed by it.
Van Dam and her husband enlisted the Rome-born architect and designer Achille Salvagni, whom van Dam had first met roughly a decade earlier while interviewing him for a Dutch magazine. The professional encounter developed into a friendship between their families, and this apartment became Salvagni’s first project for them. They gave him, as van Dam puts it, “complete carte blanche.”
The apartment had been remade many times over the centuries, leaving behind a warren of undersized rooms. Salvagni approached the project as an architectural correction before anything else. “I never decorate a space for the sake of decoration,” he says. “For me, interior architecture is an expression of volumes, surfaces, and flow.”
Adrian Gaut
A custom dining table, handmade in Rome from bronze cast at the same foundry used by the Vatican, is surrounded by 1950s Ico Parisi chairs upholstered in Dedar. Overhead hangs Salvagni’s Brera chandelier.
Over the two-year update, Salvagni and his team rethought wall placement, tweaked the layout, and carefully rearranged sight lines so that the apartment gradually reveals itself. In the space, Salvagni’s signature architectural vocabulary—curves, burnished metals, and subtly surreal forms—seems to reflect the city itself. The Spanish Steps may sit directly outside, but the project’s real reference point is Rome’s Baroque instinct: its love of procession, surprise, and optical illusion.
“There is always an element that breaks the rule that you would expect,” Salvagni says. He speaks of his work with academic fluency, but his rooms are never solemn. Tiny bees appear as cabinet handles, a reference to the Barberini family crest; Roman busts sit alongside midcentury furniture; a green marble threshold borrows the softened profile of the Spanish Steps themselves, worn down by generations of passing feet.
In the living room, he softened the meeting point between the walls and ceiling with a continuous cove, making a not-especially lofty space feel looser and taller. The ceiling is painted the palest pink, set against walls in a buttery off-white, while reclaimed oak flooring brings an immediate sense of age underfoot. The windows are framed in hammered brass, a nod to the reflective surfaces that once helped amplify light in Roman interiors.
Adrian Gaut
In the primary bedroom, a Lancea floor lamp and Vittoria Mini armchair, both by Salvagni, sit beside a carved wall inlay featuring a Roman bust.
At the center sits a curving custom sofa, whose broad arc gathers the room around the view. A painting that Salvagni found in New York has become an unexpected participant in the room: Van Dam says guests seated across from it often cross their legs just as the figure in the portrait, which was made by British painter Jack Penny, does. “It’s like one of the other guests,” she says.
The fireplace is another small act of Roman mischief. Rather than install a traditional surround, Salvagni created a stylized mouth punctuated by a tongue of deep-red marble, inspired by the nearby Casa Zuccari, whose famously fantastical windows take the form of open mouths. It could have become cartoonish; instead, it’s a detail one only notices after a second drink.
Take a tour of this serene Rome apartment
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Getting the apartment to this point was no easy feat. The area surrounding the Spanish Steps is restricted to cars, which meant the team could only make deliveries between 4 and 6 in the morning. Van Dam laughs when she says that she and her husband made it through the renovation without a marital crisis, which she considers a mark of the team’s competence.
Now, in the morning, she drinks coffee by the balcony door, with the piazza to one side and the apartment’s softly gilded living room to the other. “It’s timeless,” van Dam says. “I don’t think I will ever get enough of it.”
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Julia Cancilla is the social media & news editor at ELLE Decor, where she oversees the brand’s socials and covers design, pop culture, and emerging trends. She also authors the monthly ELLE Decoroscope column. Her work has appeared in Inked magazine, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, and more.