Italian entrepreneur Daniele Kihlgren has built a hospitality model in which the hotel is not a building but an entire village — rooms scattered across existing houses, with the settlement itself functioning as the property.

The project, profiled by Il Sole 24 Ore, is the clearest existing example of the Italian "albergo diffuso" — literally "scattered hotel" — a format in which guest accommodations are distributed among separate structures inside an inhabited or semi-abandoned village rather than concentrated in a single building.

Kihlgren's approach differs fundamentally from resort development. Instead of constructing new inventory, the model reuses existing rural building stock, which keeps capital expenditure on real estate acquisition and restoration rather than on ground-up construction and the operating overhead of a conventional full-service property.

What does the scattered-hotel model change economically?

The format alters the cost structure of a hotel in several ways:

• No single large building to build, heat, staff and secure — fixed costs spread across dispersed, smaller units.
• Restoration spending doubles as heritage preservation, which has historically opened access to public and cultural-heritage funding streams in Italy.
• The surrounding village — its streets, shops and residents — becomes part of the product, so the "property" generates guest experience without corresponding asset cost.

For rural markets struggling with depopulation, the model also functions as local economic policy: tourism revenue flows into an existing community rather than into a self-contained resort enclave that captures spending on site.

Why does the concept matter now?

The scattered-hotel format has spread as a template across rural Italy and beyond, adopted by other operators seeking to monetize historic building stock without large-scale new construction. Kihlgren's project is the reference case that Il Sole 24 Ore returns to when explaining how the format works in practice.

The underlying economics appeal to markets where village real estate is cheap, heritage designations restrict demolition and rebuilding, and conventional hotel development would be unviable at achievable average daily rates.

Interest in the model reflects broader pressure on the hospitality sector to expand room inventory through conversion and adaptive reuse rather than new builds, as construction costs continue to reshape development math across Europe.

As depopulating hilltowns across southern Europe search for revenue models that do not require displacing residents, Kihlgren's village-as-hotel experiment remains the format's most-cited proof of concept.