luca pronzato to open casa ideale, a pop-up hotel and gallery inside a 1970s arles villa

casa ideale opens inside émile sala’s villa bank in arles

At the edge of the historic Mediterranean city of Arles, Villa Bank becomes the first address for Casa Ideale, a new hospitality project by Luca Pronzato and We Are Ona. The 1970s house, designed by Émile Sala, sets the tone from the start with curved volumes, pale surfaces, a pool, and rooms that seem to move between interior space and the landscape outside.

Casa Ideale begins as a pop-up hotel from July 1st — 10th, 2026, during the opening week of Les Rencontres de la Photographie, before continuing with the exhibition Prologue through October. Guests will stay inside the villa, eat at a restaurant led by chef Gil Nogueira, and move through a house arranged as both living space and cultural setting.

images © Laurent Giannesini

an inhabitable cultural project

Luca Pronzato’s route into Casa Ideale comes through food, but the project stretches well beyond the table. After founding We Are Ona in 2019, he built a platform around temporary restaurants placed inside unexpected architectural settings, often timed with art and design weeks across cities including Venice, Milan, Arles, Miami, Hong Kong, and New York.

For Casa Ideale, that temporary energy moves into a more domestic frame. The project is described as the first chapter in a future collection of villas and living spaces, with Villa Bank serving as a pilot address. It sits somewhere between a guesthouse, an exhibition space, a culinary residency, and an editorial platform, shaped around stays, private dinners, and cultural programming.

Villa Bank becomes the first address for Casa Ideale in Arles

photography and design take over the rooms

The inaugural exhibition, Prologue, is organized with Fondazione Sozzani and curated by Maddalena Scarzella, bringing more than sixty photographs from the Carla Sozzani Collection into the villa. Works by figures including Urs Lüthi and Helmut Newton enter the rooms alongside pieces selected by Luna Laffanour’s Downtown+ gallery, turning the house into what the project calls a sequence of ‘rooms of vision.’

The design selection gives the house its lived-in tension. A modular de Sede DS-600 sofa curves around a conical Max Sauze fireplace, while Pierre Chapo’s round T21 table sits in the dining room. Elsewhere, Jean Prouvé, Gaetano Pesce, Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, and Wendy Andreu appear through beds, armchairs, lamps, mirrors, and sculptural furniture that give the villa the feel of an inhabited collection.

the 1970s villa opens as a pop-up hotel during Les Rencontres de la Photographie

a house shaped for cultural stays

Villa Bank gives the format a strong architectural beginning. Conceived in the early 1970s by Émile Sala and recognized within France’s 20th-century architectural heritage, the house is described through its post-organic language, with softened geometries and fluid volumes that press close to the surrounding garden.

Casa Ideale arrives during a time when hospitality projects are increasingly borrowing from the logic of exhibitions, residencies, and members’ clubs, while cultural projects look for settings beyond the gallery. In Arles, that shift takes the shape of a house where photography hangs near a fireplace, dinner becomes part of the program, and the architecture holds the whole experiment together without turning it into a branded hotel.

Luca Pronzato brings We Are Ona into a more permanent hospitality format

the project combines stays exhibitions private dinners and culinary residencies

Prologue brings photographs from the Carla Sozzani Collection into the rooms

project info:

name: Casa Ideale | @casa.ideale_

location: La Villa Bank

exhibition: Prologue

dates (pop-up hotel): July 1st — 10th, 2026

dates (exhibition): July — October 2026

photography: © Laurent Giannesini

The post luca pronzato to open casa ideale, a pop-up hotel and gallery inside a 1970s arles villa appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.