The ugliest hotel in the world is, for many, the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang: a 330-metre concrete pyramid with 105 floors, started in 1987 and never opened, which Esquire magazine named “the worst building in the history of mankind” in 2008. Guinness World Records lists it as the tallest unoccupied building in the world: in almost forty years it has never hosted a single guest.
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The Ryugyong Hotel: the story of the Hotel of Doom
Construction began in 1987 in Pyongyang, North Korea, with a declared goal: to build the biggest and tallest hotel in the world, with at least 3,000 rooms and five revolving panoramic restaurants at the top of the pyramid. The name means “capital of willows”, one of the city’s ancient names.
In 1992, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the country’s economic crisis, work stopped: for sixteen years the shape remained a bare concrete skeleton with no windows, visible from every point in the capital and, for years, absent from official maps. The international press nicknamed it “Hotel of Doom”. In 2008, an Egyptian group resumed work, cladding the structure in glass and metal panels, completed around 2011; in 2018 the façade became the canvas for a giant LED light show with over 100,000 points of light. The interior, though, was never completed: no rooms, no guests, no opening.
The paradox is perfect: the building born to be the symbol of an entire country’s hospitality has become the world’s symbol of the hotel that doesn’t work. And it is, in its own way, the exact opposite of the properties we cover among the strangest hotels in the world: there, an unusual design generates desire, here, an out-of-scale ambition has generated nothing but empty concrete.
Why it’s so hard to name “the ugliest”
Ugliness, in architecture, is slippery ground. The Ryugyong tops the rankings through a combination of objective factors: the story of failure, the scale disproportionate to the city, the documented abandonment. But many buildings branded hideous at birth have been rehabilitated by time: the Tour Montparnasse in Paris remains hated by Parisians, while entire brutalist neighbourhoods from the 1970s, demolished to applause, would today have plenty of defenders. Even the Ryugyong, its pyramid shape now clad in glass, has its admirers among fans of monumental architecture.
For anyone running a hotel, the lesson is practical: guests’ aesthetic judgement is less fickle than critics’, because it doesn’t judge style, it judges care. A guest forgives a dated building; they don’t forgive a feeling of neglect. And that’s where the real mistakes happen.
Italy’s ugliest hotel? No single name, plenty of recurring mistakes
Fortunately, Italy has no official ugliness ranking, and singling out one property would be pointless: Italian hotel “ugliness” almost never lives in one spectacularly wrong building, but in a series of small, repeated, highly recognisable mistakes, ones that guests photograph in reviews far more often than managers realise. These are the mistakes worth knowing.
The mistakes that age a hotel before its time
| Recurring mistake | Effect on the guest | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Cold, uniform light (4000K and above) | Clinic-like atmosphere, unflattering photos | Warm light, 2700-3000K, across several levels |
| Dated carpet with 1990s patterns | Immediate impression of age and poor cleanliness | Replacement, or switch to LVT and rugs |
| Disconnected furniture, accumulated over different eras | No identity, sense of improvisation | A unified design, a defined palette |
| Random colours or yellowed yellows | The room looks worn even when clean | A studied palette of 2-3 coordinated tones |
| Worn headboards, chipped laminates | The damaged detail dominates perception | Scheduled maintenance, resistant finishes |
| 1980s bathroom with a plastic shower enclosure | It’s the review’s first negative photo | Renovate bathrooms before anything else |
Lighting deserves first place: it’s the cheapest mistake to fix and the one with the biggest impact. A well-furnished room with cold light from a central ceiling fitting looks bare; a simple room with lighting designed across three levels, ambient, reading, accent, looks cared for. The same goes for colour: shades chosen without a plan, or never updated, signal wear even on surfaces in perfect condition, as we explain in the guide on hotel room colours.
The carpet case
No material divides opinion like carpet: perfect for acoustics and underfoot comfort, it becomes the symbol of an old hotel when the pattern is dated or maintenance is lacking. The point isn’t the material but how it’s managed: in the guide on rugs and carpet in hotels we look at when it’s worth keeping, when to replace it, and with what.
Why some hotels “look old right away”
There’s a category trickier than old: new that ages badly. Hotels renovated only a few years ago that already look dated. The causes are almost always three.
The first is chasing the trend of the moment. All-over grey, taupe everywhere, tropical wallpaper: every trend timestamps the year of the renovation, and anyone walking in reads it in three seconds. Hotels that age well start from the identity of the place, and that’s the approach we take when designing a boutique hotel, where the character belongs to the property, not to someone else’s feed.
The second is saving money on the points of contact. Guests touch only a few surfaces, worktops, handles, headboard, taps, and if the cheapest material ends up right there, wear shows within two seasons, with a sense of neglect close behind. The third is the absence of a renewal plan. A hotel doesn’t age on the day it starts to look old: it ages every day nobody budgets for replacement. International chains impose 7-10 year refurbishment cycles for rooms, and independent properties that keep the same pace, deciding how often to renew furniture years in advance, never reach the point where a guest writes “hotel needs redoing”.
The Ryugyong’s lesson for anyone furnishing a real hotel
The Ryugyong remains a warning at city scale, but its underlying mistake can be replicated in miniature: thinking of the building as a monument rather than a machine for hospitality. A hotel is ugly when it’s designed to impress whoever looks at it rather than to serve whoever lives in it.
The remedy, at the scale of an Italian property with 20 or 50 rooms, is a unified project: a survey of the existing state, a coherent palette and materials, furniture designed around the real floor areas and built to contract standards. That’s the work we do as a contract partner, coordinating a selected supply chain of Italian workshops with a single point of contact from design to the hotel: it doesn’t need to astonish, it needs every room to tell the same story, and to still be telling it in ten years.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the ugliest hotel in Italy?
There’s no official ranking, and no property deserves the title. In Italy, hotel “ugliness” is almost always the sum of recurring mistakes: cold lighting, dated carpet, furniture accumulated without a plan, bathrooms never renovated. These are fixable flaws, which is why they weigh more in reviews than the building’s architecture.
Why do some hotels look old right away?
Because they chase the trend of the moment, which timestamps the renovation to the exact year it happened, and they save money on the points of contact, worktops, handles, headboards, where wear shows first. A hotel that starts from the identity of the place and uses contract-grade finishes at the critical points ages far more slowly.
What are the most common furnishing mistakes in hotels?
The most frequent are cold, flat lighting, colours chosen without a palette, furniture from different eras never coordinated, carpet with dated patterns, and a lack of scheduled maintenance on headboards and laminates. Almost all stem from the same cause: interventions accumulated over the years without an overall design.
Did the Ryugyong Hotel ever open?
No. Started in 1987 and halted in 1992, it was clad externally between 2008 and 2011 and since 2018 has hosted LED light shows on its façade, but the interiors were never completed. Guinness World Records lists it as the tallest unoccupied building in the world: 330 metres and 105 floors without a single guest.
Will the Ryugyong Hotel ever open?
After decades of stalled construction, the façade was completed and since 2018 has been used as an LED screen for light shows, but the interior has never welcomed a paying guest. There’s no official opening date, and international observers doubt the internal systems were ever completed. It remains Pyongyang’s most photographed building and the most famous warning about what happens when a project ignores guests and management.
