Experimental Group, which started as a 45㎡ cocktail bar in Paris, opens an 82-room hotel in Rome on 10 October. Sixteen hotels later, half of the group's revenue still comes from bars and restaurants. The Rome hotel stacks that same structure inside a single building.
1.On 10 October a former bank at 46 Via Ludovisi, in Rome's Ludovisi district, opens as a hotel. It is called Experimental Roma. Eighty-two rooms including suites, rated four stars. The interiors are by Paris architect Rodolphe Parente, and an opening rate takes 15% off for early bookings.
2.The operator did not start out as a hotel company. It began in 2007 with Experimental Cocktail Club, a 45㎡ bar in Paris, opened by Olivier Bon, Pierre-Charles Cros and Romée de Goriainoff with roughly 20,000 euros each. Today the group has opened 16 hotels, and its 2025 revenue was 100 million euros. Half of that revenue still comes from bars and restaurants.
3.The 82 rooms are split into 11 room types. The smallest is a 17㎡ single; the largest, the Grande Ludovisi Signature Suite, is 39㎡. The other nine types all sit between 21 and 29㎡. The 23 to 24㎡ deluxe rooms come under four names, depending on whether the window faces the garden or the street, and whether there is a balcony or a terrace.
4.Parente took the rooms in two directions. One is a Roman room drawing on the Italian Baroque, the other a contemporary room with the lines pared back. Polished stainless steel and chrome tubing sit next to Italian marble and terracotta, with 1970s Italian design quoted here and there. In the middle of the lobby stands a staircase carved like a sculpture.
5.Lurex carpet woven with metallic thread catches the lamplight strand by strand, and the chrome tubes stretch that light into long reflections. The operator says it chose materials that recall a disco on purpose. The idea is that a guest coming up from the bar late at night should not feel the mood switch off the moment they step into the corridor.
6.There are three food and drink outlets. The restaurant, Ludovisi e Cadore, is run by chef Giovanni Passerini, born in Rome and known for his work in Paris. The menu centres on quinto quarto, the Roman cooking of offal and tail. On the roof, La Terrasse puts a bar beside a pool that seems to hang in the air, and Experimental Cocktail Club Roma, named after the group's first venue, stays open late.
7.Standard rooms show on booking sites at 277 to 579 dollars a night. According to Trademark Italia, which tracks Italian hotel performance, Rome's average daily rate in 2025 was 189.63 euros, with occupancy above 78%. The hotel carries a four-star rating, yet its prices start at close to twice the market average.
8.Take a first-year ADR of 400 euros, and an occupancy of 70%, below the Rome average because it is the opening year. RevPAR comes to 280 euros, and annual room revenue to about 8.38 million euros (all estimates).
9.The yardstick for bar revenue is the group's first venue. The 45㎡ Experimental Cocktail Club in Paris took 700,000 euros in its second year. Rome adds a restaurant and a rooftop bar to a bar of the same name, so food and beverage revenue is put at around 5 million euros (estimate). That means roughly 37% of total revenue comes from outside the rooms.
10.At a conventional star-rated hotel, revenue beyond rooms would come from breakfast, banquets and corporate events. This hotel has no ballroom and only one small meeting room, and larger events are sent to partner venues. The money comes in at night instead. The 82 rooms can sleep a little over 160 people a day, but at the rooftop bar and the cocktail club, Romans take and leave the seats again and again for as long as the doors are open.
11.In 2021 the group raised 380 million euros. Of that, 350 million went into a property company in which Canadian manager Brookfield Asset Management holds the majority, and 30 million was kept to grow the brand. Until then the group had only leased and operated buildings; from that point it moved to co-owning them. The ownership of the Rome bank building has not been disclosed.
12.That same year the founders told a French trade publication that, of everything they do, hotels are the simplest. Hotel guests are a fixed group, a hundred or so at most, while a bar means endless turnover, broken glasses and noise. The bar company moved into hotels not because rooms earn more, but because they wobble less. So which side brings the customers in? Still the bar.
13.Via Veneto, in front of the hotel, is the street known as the setting of Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita. What travellers want to buy on this street is the night more than the room, and selling the night is something bar companies were doing long before hotel companies.
14.The group's first hotel was the Grand Pigalle Hôtel, opened in Paris's Pigalle in 2015 with an investment of 7 million euros. Then came the 18-room Henrietta Hotel in London's Covent Garden, followed by Venice, Menorca and Verbier, each with a bar of its own. In a March interview this year Bon said the group nearly doubles in size every year, and the revenue forecast for this year is 140 million euros.
15.Between 2025 and early 2026, Rome is adding 14 five-star hotels and 1,500 rooms. This hotel keeps costs down with a four-star rating and rooms mostly between 21 and 29㎡. The risk is the roof. A rooftop with a pool and a bar pulls in summer revenue, but guests thin out in winter, and the indoor bar and restaurant have to fill that gap (estimate).
A company that began as a 45㎡ cocktail bar in Paris is opening 82 rooms in a former bank in Rome. It skipped the ballroom and put in a restaurant, a rooftop bar and a cocktail club, and an estimated 37% or so of revenue will come from outside the rooms. Anyone in Korea converting a city office building into a hotel and putting a bar and pool on the roof will hit structure first. The question is whether the old slab can carry the weight of a water-filled tank, and once the roof becomes a space where guests linger, evacuation stairs and railing standards follow. Which company runs the bar comes after that.