Boris Messmer on The Florentin and the Frankfurt We Thought We Knew
- Andrew C.
- 4 hours ago
- 15 min read
For decades, Frankfurt has occupied a singular position within Europe: defined by finance, movement and international exchange, it is one of the continent’s great crossroads. The world has long passed through Frankfurt, yet relatively few travelers have been encouraged to stop and look more closely.
Boris Messmer knew that perception well. Before moving to Frankfurt, he knew the airport, the banks and the familiar skyline. What he discovered after arriving was considerably more layered: a remarkably cosmopolitan community surrounded by some of Germany’s most celebrated wine regions, a centuries-old tradition of philanthropy, and an arts and cultural landscape whose ambition far exceeds Frankfurt’s relatively modest scale.
It is against this backdrop that The Florentin has arrived.
Occupying a restored 1902 villa in leafy Sachsenhausen, the hotel has been conceived as an urban retreat: deeply considered, globally minded and intended to become part of Frankfurt’s cultural life rather than simply another luxury address.
For Messmer, the project also marks a return. After fourteen years abroad and a career shaped by some of Europe’s most established luxury hotels, he came back to Germany to lead one of the country’s most ambitious recent openings. When the opportunity first arrived, his instinct echoed a question many travelers might still ask: Why Frankfurt? Then he saw the property.
Our conversation began there and soon moved beyond the making of a hotel.
We spoke about why Frankfurt may have underestimated its own appeal; why some of the most important details in hospitality should barely be noticed; what happens behind the scenes when 150 people come together to make a newly opened hotel feel effortless; and how two decades spent working across different cultures and generations have shaped Messmer’s approach to hospitality and leadership.
The conversation became personal as well, from his enduring affection for Corsica and pride in German wine to his belief that a hotel should never simply attempt to recreate home. As his own relationship with travel has evolved, so has his understanding of luxury, increasingly defined by time, discovery and the experiences we share with others.
At the center of it all is a larger question: can a hotel change the way we see a city—and can Frankfurt persuade travelers to stay a little longer?
The Return
After fourteen years working outside Germany, returning home was not necessarily part of Boris Messmer’s plan.
His career had taken him through some of Europe’s most established luxury hotels, from London to the Côte d’Azur, where the codes of international hospitality were already deeply ingrained. Frankfurt presented a very different proposition. When the opportunity to lead The Florentin first reached him, his response was instinctive: he needed to see the property for himself.
What he found was still very much a work in progress. The historic villa had been stripped back, construction was underway, and much of what would eventually become The Florentin existed only through plans, samples, and imagination. Then he stepped into the courtyard.
“I walked into the courtyard and immediately felt connected to the property.”
Built around a villa dating to 1902, the architecture reminded Messmer less of a conventional German city hotel than of homes he had encountered south of the Alps. He spoke of Italy, Spain and Morocco, where an enclosed courtyard becomes the heart of the house: protected from the street, open to the sky and shaped around a more private rhythm of life.
That first encounter would eventually inform much of The Florentin’s identity. Beyond its walls, Frankfurt remains energetic and intensely connected; inside, the courtyard creates an immediate change of pace. Messmer saw in that contrast the possibility of a hotel with its own character—rooted in its surroundings while speaking naturally to an international traveler.
The project also appealed to something fundamental in his character. Messmer is drawn to beginnings: the process of taking a property from construction site to functioning hotel, and the opportunity to influence decisions guests may eventually experience without ever knowing they were made.
“Take a second look. Who’s going to Lyon? Who’s going to Frankfurt?”
At The Florentin, that involvement extended well beyond operations. Working alongside the design and development teams, he became closely involved with mock-up rooms, materials, practical details, and the sequence of the guest experience. It allowed him to consider the property both as the person responsible for operating it and as someone helping determine how it should feel.
After years spent leading established hotels, The Florentin offered a different challenge: the opportunity to help define one from the beginning.
Frankfurt’s Identity Problem
For a city of Frankfurt’s economic importance, its international image remains surprisingly narrow.
Banking, trade fairs and one of Europe’s busiest airports have long defined how much of the world encounters it. Frankfurt became exceptionally good at attracting people with a specific purpose—business, finance, a meeting, a connection—without necessarily convincing them to stay once that purpose had passed.
Messmer arrived with many of the same assumptions.
Living here began to challenge them. Walking through the city, he regularly heard French, Italian, Spanish and English alongside German, reflecting a population shaped by finance, diplomacy, trade and generations of international residents. Yet despite that global character, Frankfurt remains compact enough for much of daily life to happen on foot.
Then there was everything surrounding it.
Within easy reach are some of Germany’s most important wine regions, including the Rheingau, Rheinhessen and Hessische Bergstrasse. The climate is comparatively mild, vineyards sit remarkably close to the urban center, and some of the country’s most compelling restaurants and producers can be reached without turning the journey into an expedition.
The disconnect between what Frankfurt possesses and how little of it is communicated internationally became increasingly apparent.
“There is so much in Frankfurt. We just haven’t been very good at telling people about it.”
Part of the explanation may lie in Frankfurt’s own success. Commerce generated prosperity without requiring the city to cultivate the kind of leisure identity developed by destinations such as Paris, Rome or Barcelona. Tourism existed, but it rarely needed to become central to Frankfurt’s understanding of itself.
Culture tells another story.
“Frankfurt offers very different layers when it comes to a German city,” Messmer said. Behind the financial skyline lies a civic tradition shaped by philanthropy. Messmer was particularly struck by the longstanding expectation that those who prosper in Frankfurt contribute to the society around them—through money, time or participation. Museums, cultural institutions and the performing arts have benefited from that relationship for generations, helping a relatively compact city sustain an extraordinary concentration of cultural life.
That history complicates the familiar image of Frankfurt as a banking capital. Wealth here has not only built towers; it has helped build collections, institutions and a public cultural landscape whose significance is easy to overlook from the departure lounge.
“Everybody contributes something. It has nothing to do with wealth.”
This is where Frankfurt’s opportunity becomes particularly interesting. Europe hardly needs another version of Paris or Milan. Experienced travelers have already visited its most celebrated capitals many times. The next discovery may instead lie in cities whose stories have received less international attention—places where gastronomy, culture and everyday life can still be encountered with a degree of spontaneity.
Frankfurt, Messmer believes, belongs in that conversation.
The challenge is no longer whether the city has enough to offer. It is whether Frankfurt can learn to tell its own story.
Frankfurt For the Curious
Read our cultural travel guide for Frankfurt and the full review of The Florentin.
The Invisible Architecture of Hospitality
For someone so closely involved in the making of The Florentin, Boris Messmer is surprisingly uninterested in guests noticing how much work went into it.
In fact, his preferred response is almost the opposite.
“If somebody says, ‘I had such a great experience, but I can’t pinpoint why,’ then I think we’ve done a good job.”
That idea reveals much about how Messmer approaches hospitality. A guest may consciously notice the architecture, a beautiful fabric or the way a room has been composed, but much of what determines how a hotel feels operates at a more instinctive level. His ambition is to engage the senses together, allowing sight, sound, scent and touch to register without demanding attention individually.
Messmer became involved at an unusually granular level, working alongside the development and design teams on mock-up rooms, materials and operational decisions to understand how the hotel would function once drawings became reality. In the guestrooms, that meant questioning something as basic as where a suitcase should go. Rather than relying on the familiar folding luggage rack, he pushed for a dedicated place to set it down, even considering where repeated contact from suitcases might damage furniture and how those surfaces could be protected.
The less tangible elements received equal consideration.
The Florentin’s scent was developed specifically for the property. Music was treated as part of the atmosphere rather than background decoration. Fabrics, finishes and tactile materials were considered for how they would register together. For Messmer, these elements are most successful when the guest experiences their cumulative effect without consciously separating one from another.
"Even the bread became a design problem." While developing the restaurant experience, Messmer and the team considered what happens when warm bread is placed directly onto a conventional plate: condensation gathers underneath, compromising something seemingly simple before the meal has properly begun. Their solution was a specially conceived surface with small raised points, preventing the warm bread from resting completely flat and becoming soggy.
The example is unusually specific, which is precisely what makes it revealing.
For Messmer, bread is fundamental to the experience of a meal. Its monetary value may be modest compared with the ingredients that follow, yet that makes its execution no less important. The same scrutiny therefore applies whether he is considering the architecture of a room or the surface beneath a piece of bread.
“It’s very important that all your senses get triggered in a way.”
This way of thinking runs throughout The Florentin. Messmer looks for small points of friction before a guest encounters them: how a material feels beneath the hand, what someone hears upon entering a space, how a scent registers. Individually, these decisions may appear inconsequential. Together, they create the sense that everything is somehow where it should be.
For Messmer, the greatest compliment may be that the guest feels the result without ever needing to understand how it was achieved.
The Myth of the Perfect Opening
For all the precision that goes into creating a hotel like The Florentin, Boris Messmer is realistic about one thing: opening day marks the beginning of a hotel’s evolution, not its completion.
An opening brings together architecture, technology, service standards and, in The Florentin’s case, a team of people who have never previously operated as one. Each may arrive with experience and expertise, but learning how to move together takes time.
“You bring 150 people together who have never worked together before.” For Messmer, this is one of the realities of hotel openings that guests, and sometimes the industry itself, can easily underestimate. Procedures can be written, training completed and rooms meticulously prepared, yet the instinctive coordination of an established hotel develops through repetition. Teams learn one another’s rhythms. Departments discover where information gets lost. Processes that appeared perfectly logical on paper are tested against the unpredictability of daily operations.
He is equally candid about the time this requires. In his experience, genuine operational synchronization can take close to a year. That perspective also shapes how he thinks about evaluating newly opened hotels. Judging a property immediately after opening, he argues, can overlook the reality that the building may be finished while the organization within it is still learning how to function as a whole.
“The biggest challenge nowadays, I wouldn’t even say is the team. I think it is the modern technology.”
More surprisingly, when asked about one of the greatest challenges of opening a contemporary luxury hotel, Messmer did not begin with service, design or staffing.
He spoke about technology.
The modern hotel depends on an extraordinary number of systems communicating with one another, much of it invisible to the guest. Internet infrastructure, operational software, printers, payment systems and increasingly connected equipment all need to work simultaneously. A seemingly minor configuration error can travel quickly through an operation: a printer connected to the wrong system, an interface failing to communicate, or a device that works perfectly in isolation but not within the wider network.
The irony is difficult to miss. As the guest experience becomes more intuitive, the infrastructure required to deliver it has become considerably more complex.
For Messmer, the opening period is therefore a process of observing, correcting and refining in real time. Precision at this stage extends to systems, workflows and the interactions between departments, where processes conceived before opening are continually tested against the realities of a functioning hotel.
“There’s always something you can do a bit better. There’s never the perfect way to do it.”
There is humility in that process. However carefully a hotel has been conceived, some answers only emerge once guests arrive and the building begins to live as intended. Excellence, in Messmer’s view, depends on the willingness to observe, adapt and keep refining.
Opening the doors is only the moment the real work begins.
The Hotel as Cultural Infrastructure
For Boris Messmer, The Florentin’s ambitions extend beyond becoming a hotel international travelers choose when visiting Frankfurt. He wants it to become an address the city itself uses.
That distinction matters.
Frankfurt already possesses many of the foundations sophisticated travelers increasingly seek: museums of international importance, a respected opera, a strong culinary scene and a tradition of civic patronage stretching back generations. The opportunity for The Florentin is to participate in this established landscape and create another place where its different communities can meet.
Its location makes that relationship particularly natural. From Sachsenhausen, Frankfurt’s Museumsufer and many of its leading institutions are close at hand. Messmer sees partnerships with the Städel Museum and the opera as opportunities to bring guests deeper into the city while positioning the hotel as a gathering place for those already contributing to its creative and intellectual life.
“I want The Florentin to be a haven for culturally intellectual people.”
During our own stay, we began to see that ambition taking shape. Across the restaurants, bar and public spaces, we encountered artists, cultural figures, philanthropists, creatives and familiar faces from the international worlds of art and entertainment. For a newly opened hotel, there was already a striking sense of community forming around it—people arriving to stay, certainly, but also to dine, meet, exchange ideas and spend time there.
That identity is already earning recognition beyond the hotel itself.
At The Dune, Chef Niclas Nußbaumer has built a contemporary fine-dining experience around clarity, precision and respect for the product. What immediately stood out was the confidence and maturity of its culinary direction for a restaurant still so early in its life. In June 2026, only around half a year after opening, the restaurant was awarded two MICHELIN stars, placing it firmly among Germany’s most significant new culinary addresses.
The achievement reinforces what we had already observed: the dune has the character of a destination in its own right. It gives diners a reason to seek out The Florentin independently of an overnight stay, strengthening the hotel’s role within Frankfurt’s evolving gastronomic and cultural landscape.
Messmer wants that sense of discovery to extend across the property. The bar is being shaped with a distinct identity for serious cocktail enthusiasts, while art will continue to change throughout the hotel, giving repeat visitors something new to encounter. Culinary, wellness and cultural collaborations are intended to keep introducing new ideas—and new audiences—through its doors.
For The Florentin, there is another layer to this relationship. The address already carries memories for many Frankfurt residents from its previous life. Its return therefore involves establishing a new identity while recognizing the familiarity attached to a place the local community has known for years.
Messmer is careful about placing the hotel within a much larger movement. He does not suggest that a single property can redefine Frankfurt. Cities evolve collectively, shaped by their cultural institutions, restaurants, businesses, residents and the people willing to invest ideas and energy in them. The Florentin’s role is to contribute to that momentum.
The more revealing measure of The Florentin’s success may ultimately be the relationships it builds with the people around it. As travelers and residents, artists and cultural communities begin to inhabit the same spaces for different reasons, the hotel acquires something that cannot be established through design or positioning alone: a genuine place within the life of the city.
A great city hotel can reveal something about the place around it while giving that place a new reason to gather.
What Luxury Becomes
After more than two decades in international hospitality, Boris Messmer has spent much of his career navigating other people’s expectations—of service, leadership, travel and luxury. Experience appears to have made him increasingly selective about which conventions still matter to him.
With people, he values clarity. “I’m very direct. I’m honest, and I think I’m fair,” he said. Messmer prefers difficult conversations to happen with the person concerned. Years spent working across generations, nationalities and personalities have taught him that the way those conversations happen may need to change, even when the expectations behind them remain consistent. He has learned, in effect, to adapt the method without compromising the standard.
That openness to different perspectives extends well beyond the hotel.
“Travel broadens your horizon. You see things differently,” he said. Travel remains a way of challenging familiarity. Exposure to different cultures, characters and ways of living has made him wary of perspectives formed within too narrow a frame of reference. Perhaps this is also why his own travel preferences resist a formula.
What he seeks from travel shifts with the moment. A city can provide the intellectual stimulation he wants; skiing offers physical release; a rented house provides privacy and independence. Sport remains one of the ways he clears his head from the intensity of hotel life, while friendships maintained over many years offer another kind of refuge, with relationships untouched by title or professional expectation.
“Hotel should give you warmth and hospitality. Of course, it should also inspire you.”
Returning to Germany after years abroad has also changed how he sees what was once familiar. He speaks with particular pride about German wine and has begun rediscovering regions close to home with the curiosity of someone who has gained distance from them. What once seemed ordinary can acquire a different value after enough time away.
Then there is Corsica.
Messmer speaks about the island with particular affection, drawn to its wild landscape and the determination with which Corsicans have protected their identity. Accessibility still requires a certain effort, mass tourism has altered it less aggressively than many Mediterranean destinations, and the island retains a character that can occasionally feel uncompromising.
That, for Messmer, is part of its appeal.
His attraction to Corsica reveals something broader about how he travels. He gravitates towards places whose sense of self remains stronger than the expectations imposed upon them by visitors. The increasingly commercialized destinations of global tourism hold less fascination; character, landscape and a certain degree of independence carry greater value.
The same instinct informs his view of hotels. Messmer is unconvinced by the familiar promise of a “home away from home.” He already has a home. Travel should provide comfort and warmth, certainly, but also encounter and discovery: an unfamiliar material, a different way of arranging a space, something tasted for the first time, or an idea compelling enough to carry back into everyday life.
After a career spent surrounded by the conventional symbols of luxury, his personal definition has become considerably more fluid.
“The older I get, the more luxury is time.”
Luxury might be the solitude of a mountain lake. It might be privacy, the convenience of being somewhere close, or simply having enough time to spend with people he cares about. The answer changes with circumstance because, for Messmer, value increasingly resides in the quality of a moment rather than the material language traditionally used to signify it.
“At the end of our lives, nobody will look back at something they purchased. Everybody will look back at the moments they created together,” he mentioned. Perhaps that is what luxury becomes with experience: the freedom to recognize what matters when it matters, and the time to give it your full attention.
The Frankfurt We Thought We Knew
For all the ambition surrounding The Florentin, Boris Messmer’s measure of its success is strikingly human. He wants guests to recognize what the team has created, to leave wanting to return and, eventually, to recommend the experience to someone else.
Something is revealing in that simplicity. Throughout our conversation, Messmer spoke about the extraordinary complexity behind hospitality: the precision of design, the realities of opening, the challenge of bringing people together and the constant adjustment required to make a hotel feel effortless. Ultimately, all of that work is measured by something far less complicated: how a guest feels.
The same could perhaps be said of Frankfurt.
For decades, the city has been remarkably successful at communicating what it does—finance, commerce, connectivity—while revealing considerably less about how it lives. Its cultural institutions, international community, traditions of philanthropy and remarkable quality of life have long been part of its identity. What appears to be changing is the confidence with which another side of Frankfurt is being expressed.
“I want people to come here and say, ‘Through word of mouth, I heard you created a place where people like to be.’”
The Florentin enters that conversation with an interesting role to play. Messmer is realistic about the influence a single hotel can have, and perhaps that restraint is precisely the point. The property does not need to reinvent Frankfurt. Its greater opportunity lies in becoming sufficiently connected to the city that staying there reveals something about the place around it.
When we first sat down with Messmer, one question sat at the center of our conversation: can a hotel change the way we see a city—and can Frankfurt persuade travelers to stay a little longer?
Perhaps the answer lies less in changing Frankfurt than in changing our perception of it. The Florentin gives us another way into the city, and with it, a reason to reconsider a place we thought we already knew.
Frankfurt may not need to become the city travelers have been waiting for. Perhaps it simply needs more reasons for them to discover the city it has always been—and The Florentin may prove to be one of them.
