Within the renaissance interiors of this dazzling grand palazzo apartment, Ramdane Touhami completes his most ambitious interior yet.
“I’m very excited about the idea of making our new flat in Rome,” announced Ramdane Touhami, the interior designer, DJ, creative director and artist, on Instagram last August. “Making a flat that looks like a museum could be fun!”
It turns out that Touhami was not underselling his ambitions for his grand palazzo project. His new “flat” is, in fact, a museum-worthy work of architecture: a grand apartment in Rome’s historic Palazzo Borghese, in the city’s Campo Marzio district. Construction began on the earliest sections of the muscular late Renaissance palazzo in the 1560s; it was designed by the renowned Mannerist architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (among a number of other hugely influential projects, Vignola completed work on St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican after the death of Michelangelo). The palazzo was later expanded by Cardinal Camillo Borghese, who purchased it in 1596. He would go on to become the building’s namesake – and Pope Paul V.
In the roughly F-shaped, 280-square-metre Touhami apartment, several-metre-high ceilings are crowned with decorative paintings and frescoes; these are joined by other details accrued over countless interventions across the centuries, like the B-for-Borghese door pulls in the dining room which, according to Touhami, date to the 19th century. It is the latest home for the itinerant designer, his wife, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, and their three children, aged 22, 20 and 18. The couple’s Paris apartment, in a former home of the French author Honoré de Balzac, made daring use of ebony panelling, which was constructed to give the illusion that a large section of the burled wood was peeling away from the wall to expose swirls of decorative moulding beneath.
In the Palazzo Borghese, there is no such sleight of hand, but there is no less magic. First, there is the surprise of the entrance, a long, gallery-like hall and salon which Touhami has punctuated with geometric white-oak furniture of his own design and an assemblage of statuettes and busts by Roman students. Along the floor and on the walls in this space are images from the book Roman Portraits, published by Phaidon in 1940. “The faces are so contemporary,” says Touhami. “Any of these could be people you see today.” There is a similar contemporary energy to the two oversized portraits that flank the formal dining room. Painted against vibrant blue backgrounds, the images depict politicians Andrea Costa and Pietro Nenni, founders of the Italian Socialist movement. “We bought them in a flea market,” says Touhami.
Throughout the palazzo apartment, Touhami seems to have had fun combining and collapsing design eras – antiquity, mid-20th-century Modernism and beyond. In the principal bedroom, a 19th-century Neopolitan bed in elaborately decorative metal strikes a contemporary note, despite its age. A 1940s Thonet bench and an Audoux-Minet floor lamp dating from the 1970s stand sentry nearby.
In a relatively less formal, though still impressive, dining area off the principal suite, this Touhamian play with time continues: here, he has combined a 1918 Red Blue lounge chair by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld with pieces from the 1930s, 50s and 80s. Despite the 20th-century energy, there is an ease to the mix. Perhaps this is because finding harmony in disparate aesthetics is central to the partnership between Touhami and de Taillac. “Victoire and I have totally different taste,” says Touhami, explaining that the design of their homes’ private rooms is usually the domain of de Taillac. “We never walk on each other’s feet,” he adds.
On a recent visit, during a quiet holiday afternoon in Rome, Touhami bustled from room to room, then disappeared for video calls with partners in Japan and a client in London. Jazz and funk music from across the African diaspora thrummed from a floor speaker in the gallery-salon. On the way out, Touhami stopped to demonstrate one of his favourite features of the space: a small hidden window in the guest bathroom. Its opening provides a view of the stairwell outside the apartment – and an opportunity to eavesdrop as guests leave. “It’s fun, right?” says Touhami, smiling. “It’s a chance to hear what people have to say.” Even in the Palazzo Borghese, Touhami is still conjuring his signature mischief. @ramdanetouhami
This article was published in the AD Middle East print issue for February/March 2026.
