The Joy Of Sets! Olympic Hospitality suite design and build, we are going back to the roots and what led to this year’s return to the Olympics at the Milano Cortina Games 2026.
I am in Worcester chambers of commerce offices in 2003, in the historic city of Worcester. We had successfully for three years delivered the complete production install for their business festival, bringing together new businesses in the area to a wider B2B marketplace. One of the businesses was Innocent drinks and it was great to see the rise of their business from their basic first stand with us to being bought by Coca Cola.
I had put a pitch together, including 160 exhibition stands, a gala dinner and an exterior exhibition all at the Malvern three counties showground. You know when you know, and I could feel the room was just ticking boxes and our time delivering this event for them, was over. They had new people who wanted their teams in and their new ideas for 2003, so it was not meant to be. It goes that way sometimes when you are pitching and I have had much rougher ones since with a wide range of clients, but since some of those people read this, we will save those stories for the pub!!!!!!
I shook hands, said goodbye, and went downstairs to the wet and windy carpark and my phone rang. Well, if ever there was a definition of serendipity this was it. My friend Julia Barnard whom I had worked with previously with Olly Olsen on many tricky projects out of Brighton, rang me from Australia. It was lovely to hear from her and when she asked me if I was available to chat through a project in Athens for the 2004 games, I stopped feeling quite so useless for not landing the pitch and focussed on getting back to the office.
Milano Cortina Games hospitality suite 2026, HBO MAX, Home of the Olympics in Europe.
One phone call has launched us to 4 Olympic games since 2004, Athens, Torino, London and Milano Cortina turning over £2 million in revenue in that time. We did have a false start with Beijing and I was literally at the airport in Manchester, all checked in and told to go back to the workshops as Boris Johnson had cut the London House budget and that included us. That was very dull considering we had workshops set up in Beijing and everything ready to develop the concepts we were expecting. The Olympics, however, is also the reason why we live in Italy and work out of here supplying services throughout Italy for corporate and experiential events and Exhibitions.
Why is it the reason we live here you may ask!! Well London Olympics for us was the last major project we did from our workshops in North Wales. I put some aspects of the business on hold whilst we dealt with the large volume of work we did for a very demanding client for London 2012. Suffice it to say apart from a few key client team members it was a miserable client experience and not helped by LOCOG being rather useless on the ground in their preparation of the space which had major knock on effects to our delivery, at our expense!! Not forgiving that, ever, but won’t go into it either, unless we are in the pub together one day! It was such a miserable experience that whilst my wife and I were on standby on site at the Olympic park we decided that this was not just the last games but also the last design and build we would be doing in the current format of a workshop and large team. We decided to close and seek a simpler solution to our working and personal lives.
We did a Rightmove search whilst on site at the Olympic park in August, found a house in Italy, went to see it in October, bought it in January and moved here in May 2013. I write it like that, as that is how much thought went into it, we just needed to get out.
The kudos of working on the largest project in town and having nice photos of the work and the resilience you need to build up to work through hours of paperwork learning new systems and that countries bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, stays with you of course. The lasting effects of those experiences in such an intense environment is that you can bring more to the party next time and hopefully guide clients to a fluid journey at the next games that they might not otherwise have.
Fast forward to 2025 and I was doing a project for Shelton Fleming, now Impact-xm , recently merged with Jack Morton, keep up, in Rome and I was asked if I had anything for the Olympics 2026. I had been doing some research for a client for sustainability in Italy and advising on what facilities there were for facilitating recycling and re purposing for their 2026 clients coming to Milan. With such a manic 2025 looming I was I was not going to repeat 2026 in the same overfilled way, I was intrigued as the people at SF are delightful, creative and fun to be with and I made my mind up to only work with these guys. Due to the lovely events people in the UK putting us forward to their friends and clients we had a lot of enquiries through Facebook and LinkedIn mainly, we had a few enquiries and consultancy days helping put the correct suppliers to the clients but we turned down a large offer to build a huge quantity of small repeat exhibition stands in all the widespread main venues for a UK client. Knowing the tardiness of any Italian paperwork system I don’t have enough patience left in my soul to repeat the paperwork for multiple venues and no doubt dealing with no replies to emails from those multiple venues for weeks and you having to chase them, for weeks, no thanks!!
Working visual of the suite Milano Cortina Games hospitality suite 2026, HBO MAX, Home of the Olympics in Europe.
So, I was on board with Impact-xm, we had a lovely lunch in Milan in May 2025 and went to look at a lovely hotel in the centre of Milan the Palazzo Parigi hotel and spa. The beauty of this venue is that it is not in any Olympic cordon that would get tightened and make access difficult, also it is not under any security screening and not subject to any licensing that would add to costs.
Marvellous. A pretty much finished design by the end May 2025, which was tweaked in November, signed off and started pre-Christmas with all the time to deal with additions that we needed. It was like a textbook project that could be taught at college to wannabe event folks. There is no catch to this story, we loaded out on Monday 23rd, without incident, apart from the usual traffic and parking nonsense in a city centre and the client and the Hotel were all very happy. What’s not to love about that!
Milano Cortina Games hospitality suite 2026, HBO MAX, Home of the Olympics in Europe.
Would this cosseted experience take me back into the Olympic world on the park or to get involved in the official design and build pitching for the main hospitality suites? Nope, if we are not learning from our previous experience, is that not the definition of insanity? It is not what we moved here for and whilst it was great to have 2025 as busy as it was, 2026 is going to be more measured and will give me more time to deal with what I love about the job, the detail.
We have a steady flow of work in Italy and abroad until the end of June with a planned summer of falling back in love with Italy and I look forward to what comes along in the Autumn.
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www.penhaligonec.com
Visuals: Impact-xm Photos: Silvia Rivoltella
