architecture, Frame Magazine, hotel design, interior design, published article

Hi Hotel

By Robert Such. Published in Frame Magazine.

The 38-room Hi Hotel in Nice may occupy a narrow spatial footprint, but its cultural reach is far wider, thanks to two hotel entrepreneurs, a young French designer and staff who are knowledgeable about the contemporary arts, architecture, design and music. It is also a place where notions of four-star luxury and comfort are given a contemporary twist.

Painted a pearly white, the shutterless building has undergone a radical change since its days as a boarding house. The fun begins as soon as you walk through the purple-tinted glass door on avenue des Fleurs. Purple, which signifies something “quite spiritual and high class,” says the designer Matali Crasset, is the dominant colour of the hotel. Flanking the ramp that leads up to the front desk are two low concrete walls, which have the shapes of speakers moulded into their surfaces. This is the first indication that music has a central role in the day-to-day life of the hotel. Music, provided by F Communications, the French electronic music label, plays all day and all night, and the bar area is a venue for DJ nights. Caressing the concrete is like stroking silky smooth chocolate, and it leaves a trace of dust on your fingertips. Visitors turn right into the lobby, passing through a cylindrical arrangement of colourful screen prints on unwoven fabric. Further inside, the colours include raspberry red, pistachio green, vanilla white and yellow chartreuse. A mezzanine, stacked with books donated by museums, galleries and publishers, overlooks the double-height bar and dining area. At the far end is the so-called nacelle (hot-air balloon basket). Made of birch plywood, it surrounds you in a light, protective embrace. The furniture is also in birch, with upholstery in skai artificial leather.

For the owners, Philippe Chapelet and Patrick Elouarghi, the Hi Hotel is quite different from their first joint business venture, a three-star hotel and restaurant in Brittany. They won top-notch guide-book acclaim for that, but when the weather and the clientele began to get them down, they decided to head for the French Riviera. “We worked in a château,” says Chapelet, “where it’s ‘Bonjour Madame’, and we made small talk at the table…you play a role…Life’s too short for false relationships that are a pain in the arse.” They considered places like Cannes and Monaco, but Nice seemed like the right choice. It was both working class and bourgeois (it also has a tacky and seedy side), it had a famous name and it had great weather. Travelling in other countries made them rethink what a businessman or a lone traveller required. So, they rejected the need for an enormous wardrobe and a chest of drawers and instead decided to include a goldfish (or red fish in French), as a room companion. The name Hi Hotel evolved from that idea of having a poisson rouge. On the Internet, they read that the red mark on the Japanese Koi Carp was called the Hi. As well as being the widely known one-syllable greeting, Chapelet points out that they want the hotel to attract international clients – thus, hôtel international (international hotel). It also represents hôtel interactive: Windows XP- and broadband-equipped laptops are available 24/7.

Once they had acquired the building and some firm ideas about its contents and service, Chapelet and Elouarghi scouted around for a designer at the Paris, Milan and New York design fairs. “They all proposed what we see everywhere in the design world – a little 1970s. We didn’t want fashion,” says Chapelet. So when the world-class French chef Alain Ducasse suggested looking at designers who had worked under Philippe Starck – they liked Starck – they checked out the petits enfants de Starck (Starck’s little children). Matali Crasset struck them as “very different,” says the Paris-born Chapelet.

Crasset graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure de création industrielle in 1991, which was followed by a one-year stint under the Italian designer Denis Santachiara and five years under Starck. While working with the latter she was the art director for Thomson Multimedia, before becoming the head of the Tim Thom design centre. Since then she has worked in many areas, such as graphics, exhibitions and furniture design. Her interiors include the refurbishment of the offices of Paris-based advertising agency Red Cell and a house near Lake Annecy, France, in 2001.

When Chapelet and Elouarghi saw Crasset’s work, they telephoned to arrange a meeting at her Paris office.

“The brief,” says Crasset, “was very, very flexible… We had a good understanding…From the start, it was looked at from this point of view: change things and throw out hotel typology.” Nine room types were developed. This wide range underlines the fact that “there is not one way to live; there are lots of possibilities,” says Crasset.

Monospace was the first room to take shape. It is divided into three areas, each one using different colours and materials: an invigorating red-coloured sleeping area; a cool white, lounge area with a light wood finish; and a refreshing blue-coloured bathroom with resin floor. The room is not large, but that is not important, says Crasset. ”When you think about comfort, most of the time it’s the [depth] of the foam. In fact, for me, it’s the opposite. Comfort is the structure which allows you to move and to have much more liberty…It’s more about mobility. It’s more about freedom to move…this is contemporary comfort.” As regards her thoughts on ‘luxury’, Crasset’s thinking runs along the same lines. “Luxury is not a matter of materials or cost, it’s more about the idea of space.”

Not every rooms’ spatial layout has been reorganised so radically. White & White, which to look at could be a massage parlour or clinic, has a bed that resembles a table and bath that looks like a bed. Digital has a pixilated decor and Technocorner is dedicated to video and music. Up-until-three-O’clock-in-the-morning brainstorming sessions between Crasset, Chapelet and Elouarghi gradually squeezed out the idea for the ninth room, Strate. Another concept, which was based on a giant wave made of resin, called In/Out, would have been the last one, but it was abandoned. “It was a good idea,” says Chapelet, “[but] it wasn’t strong enough. We wanted to go further.” Going further got them a room in which the glass shower and toilet cubicles each stand on a metal-framed platform, which if considered as a stage, makes a daily activity into a small performance. The stratified colour scheme on the walls signposts different activities and uses of space at various levels – white at the base points to storage, so there is a safe on the floor, and blue at the top stands for dreaming.

The crossover between private and public space in a hotel already exists; Strate breaks down the barriers even further. If there are two of you in the room, there is little privacy. It also makes entering the shower a pleasurable experience for the observer and the subject.

Objects in Matali Crasset’s world are multi-purpose. A poof can be a table. A small padded table can be a footstool. A table top can be a shelf that slots into the wall. Crasset’s work also contains elements of playfulness, or in French ludique. “Ludique means to play, to experiment,” says Crasset. She hopes that Hi Hotel visitors will use the objects they find there as children do with objects everywhere – using them not for one specific purpose but as something to stimulate the imagination and action.

interior design, published article, The Independent on Sunday

Remember Paris?

By Robert Such. Published in The Independent on Sunday.

Paris is many things: chic, sophisticated, stylish. But one thing it isn’t is mould-breaking. Modern Parisians are conservative in their tastes, and never more so than when they go clothes-shopping. While the garments themselves may not be that old-fashioned, the stores are another matter. The traditional Paris boutique is a sombre place, with dark granite floors, plain white walls and heavy, dressing-room drapes. Even in 2002, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary would not feel out of place.

At least, it used to be like that. In a spirit of ‘evolve or die’, some enlightened retailers have been challenging the French capital’s fustiness. Two boutiques in particular have caused a stir. One is by the French design duo the Bouroullec brothers; the other by Dutch group Droog Design.

On the stylish rue Saint-Honoré, Droog’s interior for Mandarina Duck is hard to miss. It assaults passing shoppers with floor-to-ceiling windows that give a clear view of the playground inside, full of vibrant colours and intriguing shapes. The Italian leatherwear manufacturer initially approached Droog about revamping its chain of stores in provincial cities, commissioning them to present their ideas for the Bologna branch. Briefed to design “the same but different,” says Renny Ramakers, the Dutch came up with something completely new. “When we tabled our proposals,” Droog’s Renny Ramakers says, “Mandarina Duck ‘upgraded’ us to Paris.”

Visiting the Paris shop is like playing a game of hide-and-seek. A big steel, doughnut-shaped container tempts the shopper to see what lies within. This is the “Inverse Clothes Rack”.

Push an item against The Pinwall standing over by the window and aluminium rods are pushed through to replicate its form on the other side. Elsewhere in the shop, rubber bands in green, red and yellow — like the bungees found on bicycle racks — keep handbags in place on the walls. Nylon jackets are inventively displayed, hung vacuum-packed between sheets of plastic.

Moving around the store is fun. A spiral staircase connects the ground floor to the second. Here, nickel-plated copper pellets make up a wavy curtain, which partitions off the luggage section. Pieter Bannenberg of NL Architects, who worked on the project, explains that this allows “freedom to move in and out. It avoids dead ends. It’s typically Dutch.”

Best of all are the “Grasslands” changing rooms. Based on photographs of crop circles, these two areas are cut off from the rest of the store by 6ft-high fibreglass quills. A giant mirror lets you check out the rather odd rubberised-paper anoraks.

This is the first shop interior for both Droog and NL Architects, which may go some way to explaining their unique approach. Likewise, the Bouroullec brothers were complete newcomers to shop design. In fact, they were so surprised to be asked to do Issey Miyake’s A-POC in the Marais district of Paris that they wondered “if it was not a casting error” says Ronan Bouroullec. Once they’d recovered from the shock, they based their quirky design on “the imagined expansion of a fruit basket”.

A-POC stands for A Piece of Cloth. The “piece of cloth” in question is a nylon, cotton, polyurethane mix fabric, which comes in a tubular roll. “A-POC is less about clothes and more about a technical solution,” Ronan explains. Anything from gloves to skirts can be chopped from the stretchy material to the buyer’s size and taste.

The shop most resembles a workshop-cum-dry-cleaner’s with a series of rails that wrap around the room. The green changing-room curtain is made of foam sandwiched between wool. Painted steel panels support magnets that slip inside the garments and hold them in place. Hangers and work surfaces hook over the narrow bars. Flexibility is the keyword: it’s designed to adapt to the demands of future collections.

Miyake commissioned the boys from Brittany to fit out A-POC on the basis of their drawings alone. The next time they saw him was the day before the opening. Fortunately, he liked what he saw. Miyake’s confidence in the Bouroullecs probably owed a lot to their reputation and string of previous successes. They have already pocketed a number of international awards, and their work has made it into Pompidou Centre’s contemporary design collection.

Despite the work of these young designers, it remains to be seen whether Parisians will be quick to confront their irrational attachment to soporific shop design.

architecture, Architectural Design, interior design, published article

90s Sci Fi meets 70s Hi Tech

By Robert Such. Published in Architectural Design.

Before we tackle the story behind Jakob and MacFarlane’s installation-cum-architecture at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, let us suggest a few possible similes. References to water suspended in zero gravity, a Rowntree fruit pastel, larvae from planet Z or worms from a Dune film set all spring to mind.

So, with that out of the way, how do the architects see their work? ‘How is more important than what’ is Dominique Jakob’s response, the objects themselves being less important than the concepts and process. Yet both are undeniably and inextricably linked and the outcome is a sensual experience.

Four, five-metre high aluminium corpuscles, amorphous and hollow, house the cloakroom and toilets, kitchen, video room, and reception within the restaurant area on the Centre Pompidou’s top floor of Piano and Rogers’ monument to High Tech.

Jakob and MacFarlane’s entry, developed on Autocad, took them past the knock out round of an international competition launched by the Pompidou Centre. Their strange globular entities were still only images on a computer screen, but in the next round they found themselves up against Philippe Starck and the duo François and Lewis. All of them had to submit a model. Jakob and MacFarlane’s went on to seduce the jury.

The competition brief called for a larger space that would cater for 300 visitors, while being able to hold a reception of a thousand. Otherwise, the constraints were minimal and provided generous room for interpretation.

Their working method includes bouncing ideas across a table strewn with sketches and texts. Elements from one stage in the creative process can become meshed into a later one, or an idea that failed to work in one step can be used in another. According to MacFarlane it is a ‘slow method, discovering how to work with the programme’, but they ‘started with a hands off approach [working with the existing context rather than starting afresh] and a position of minimising the impact of the object…being there and not being there’.

Initial ideas for a series of mirrors that would reflect the exterior were discarded in favour of hanging the volumes from the ceiling. These would have had the appearance of ‘clouds passing through’, but would have masked Piano and Rogers’ blue, green and yellow plumbing.

Once brought down to the floor, hence creating buildings within a building, the emphasis remained on limited contact with the surrounding walls and floor, and air conditioning, water and electricity is piped down from above through holes in the structures.

The dictatorial modular frame of the Centre Pompidou exerted a strong motivation to work with the floor. They scored the volumes with the ubiquitous 80 cm by 80 cm grid, which links up with the borders of the aluminium floor tiles to give the effect of a deformed surface, although this almost failed to materialise, as it was extremely difficult to find the software. They admit that they came close to dropping the whole idea of computer-generating the lines. With Mechanical Desktop, the American boat-building software, and help from Alain Duvivier at Alpha Link, however, their luck changed. Even though the pair acknowledge that if CATIA had been less costly it could well have made life simpler, the ‘DIY’ approach — the marriage of Mechanical Desktop and Autocad — proved successful. MacFarlane gestures with his hands as he describes how they ‘started with a void, followed by the suction up of the floor’, which then enabled them to calculate the position of the lines on the 4 mm thick skin and to locate any XYZ co-ordinates.

The aluminium itself, which has a milled surface — rather than facetted as was first mooted — in order to create depth by catching and reflecting light, is supported by a framework. Brightly coloured rubber linings differentiate the volumes from one another. Springs, on which the foundation beam rests, pass through the lightweight, concrete, floating floor that replaced the former rusted metal panels.

Little internal support is needed, since the skeletons are light enough to stand alone, apart from the kitchen, whose roof is some 15 metres at its broadest point. This was requested by the Costes company, which operates the restaurant, and indicates the flexibility of the architecture, in that it could be remoulded to take in volumetric alterations.

The use of folding, as seen in their 1994 T House extension, which minimised obvious boundaries and juggled with private and public space, and which Jakob and MacFarlane wanted to do in the unrealised 1996 Puzzle House, can be traced from their start up in practice in 1992 through to the present day. In addition, their interest in visual ambiguity offers different possible readings to Centre Pompidou visitors.

The latter has been explored further through a partnership with Isometric — involved as lighting consultants — iGuzzini, and Halogen to create a virtual sun. On a sunny day, shadows move slowly over Jakob and MacFarlane’s silvery landscape, but as darkness descends 320 dimmable QR 111 Halogen lamps can take over if the client wishes them to. As one group of four bulbs dims, the next group brightens, thus imitating the imperceptibly slow course of a virtual sun. It moves, however, from west to east. ‘It’s anti-nature, but it also made better sense in the way things are laid out,’ says MacFarlane.

As well as specially designed lighting, Jakob and MacFarlane worked with Cappellini to make the furniture. The injection-moulded rubber chairs are ‘super simple’ says MacFarlane and at the same height as the tables, thus providing a horizontal layer, above which the uneven surface of the aluminium rooms rises.

A striking composition has been created by the unusual juxtaposition of these forms within Piano’s High Tech environment and Jakob and MacFarlane’s work has drawn both positive and negative reactions — not unlike the Centre Pompidou did in 1977. For a national art and culture centre that is no stranger to controversy, it is par for the course. Go there and let your imagination run wild.

hotel design, architecture, Hospitality Design, interior design, published article

Denmark landmark

By Robert Such. Published in Hospitality Design.

Looking like an outsized piece of elaborately folded paper, the new Bella Sky Hotel just outside the Danish capital Copenhagen stands out on the horizon—just what Danish architectural firm 3XN and the hotel client Comwell wanted.

Sandwiched between green open spaces and Ørestad, a new city development extending southeast from the capital, the hotel is “out in a big nowhere land,” says Kim Herforth Nielsen, 3XN founder and principal architect, “so it has to be more expressive. We had to add some character to the area with this building.”

The idea was also to shift the visual focus away from the visually unremarkable low-rise Bella Center, a trade fair and conference center built back in the 1970s, towards a more iconic-looking building. Ørestad is “a new place so it lacks energy,” says Nielsen, “yet this building is meant to add some identity to the area, and the Bella Center as well. In the middle of Copenhagen it would have looked completely different.”

Given a limited building footprint and a height restriction because of the hotel’s proximity to Copenhagen airport, 3XN came up with the idea of putting two towers side by side. Tilting and folding the two glass and aluminum structures meant that more rooms could have outward-looking views and guests’ windows could be angled away from each other. As for the triangular pattern on the facade, it “came out from the two angles of the towers,” explains Nielsen.

On the inside, the triangular motif reappears in the shape of wall-mounted lobby mirrors and ceiling lights. Other key lobby design features include a 2,000-square foot [180-square meter] planted wall and a soft-lit color-changing LED chandelier.
Inspired by its surroundings, the curved green landscaping serves as a dining backdrop for the lobby’s mezzanine-level restaurant, one of the hotel’s five restaurants.

With more than 800 guestrooms, Bella Sky also stands out for its niche accommodation offering: On the 17th floor of Tower Two (dubbed the Bella Donna floor), 20 rooms are exclusively for women—from the color scheme to room accessories.

To create a warm, informal and relaxed interior in the restaurants and the 23rd-story Sky Bar, 3XN teamed up with Swedish design firm Thomas Eriksson Arkitekter (TEA). They worked with natural wood, like ash and oak, warm and cool colors, curvy furnishings—a counterpoint to the building’s angular form—and brought in furniture by Scandinavian firms and designers such as Hay, Arne Jacobsen and Finn Juhl.

“To get customers out there they needed to have something extraordinary,” says Nielsen, “and they wanted something that called for Scandinavian cool design and state of the art Scandinavian architecture.”

interior design, architecture, Courrier International, published article, The Independent

Screen Dreams

By Robert Such. Published in The Independent and Courrier International (French title: En balade dans les salles obscure).

I pressed my nose up to the small, round window and peered into the darkened room beyond. Something peculiar seemed to be happening. The jaded kiosk attendant standing by my side managed only a thin smile. She had seen it all before.

Looking closer I realised that an animated version of a Jules Verne story was playing on a screen. Naive, black and white images danced across it, painting the meagre audience with a flickering, silvery sheen.

Leaning on Montmartre’s southern slope, Studio 28 is one of hundreds of cinemas that will throw open its doors as part of France’s three-day cinema festival a week from now. Known mainly to locals and dedicated cinema buffs, its strange, plant-like decor is, in fact, the whimsical work of Jean Cocteau, artist and film-maker. He designed the wild and colourful lamps in 1948, and today they still wrap around its columns and sprout from its walls.

Studio 28 has always been a showcase for the avant-garde. Jean-Pierre Mauclaire bought its previous incarnation, cabaret club La Petaudiere, early in the last century and, in 1928 opened it as a cinema. Keeping to an innovative programme, the cinema showed films such as Abel Gance’s three-hour epic, Napoleon, to great success. Luis Bunuel’s surrealist, anticlerical and antibourgeois L’Age d’Or didn’t go down so well. Outraged Catholics destroyed the screen along with paintings by Dali, Ernst, and Miro that had been on display.

By that time Paris’ cinematic settings had come a long way from the minimal surroundings in which the Lumiÿre brothers’ showed their first projections; the wooden benches of the Salon Indien at the Grand Cafe on boulevard des Capucines.

In contrast, many of today’s cinemas are disturbingly similar to bland shopping centres and jaded leisure complexes. The truth is that giant multiplexes and US budgets draw big crowds. Although more enlightening works might be chewed over as intellectual fare, the French public, like us it seems, still fall for Hollywood blockbusters. Especially if those films include the homegrown stars, such as Gerard Depardieu, Sophie Marceau and Juliette Binoche.

The architect Kenzo Tange has given Paris its biggest (240 square metres) permanent flat screen, the Gaumont Grand Ecran. Bordering the enormous roundabout at Place d’Italie, south of the river, Tange’s post-modern offices, shopping centre, restaurant and hotel surround an atrium which is capped by a glass, sawtooth roof.

What most people miss by descending directly to the cinema is the arrangement of triangles, rectangles, squares and cubes that form an architectural extravaganza of interlocking steps and terraces up above. The overall impression is of displacement, of the elements having slipped past each other.

Back inside, despite its size, the Grand Ecran manages to invoke intimate cinematic memories. The shiny metal strip in the floor design, the enormous, inflatable Jupiter above and saucer-shaped porch at the rear work together to produce a vivid cinematic flashback to Star Wars.

Fast forward to the real-life search for curious Parisian cinemas and you’ll probably come to a stop by the three-metre high letters which announce the Rex on boulevard Poissonniere. Otherwise known as Le Grand Rex, because of its large screen, this building, with its art deco tower, represents one of Paris’ few remaining “atmospheric” cinemas.

Beyond the plush foyer, filled with deep red furnishings and Romanesque statues, is the auditorium. In 1932, when the complex was constructed, cinema owners scoured the globe for arresting architecture, many turning to South America and the Mediterranean for inspiration. This explains why the Grand Rex of today is a heady mix of Spanish haciendas, minarets and colonnades, complete with a fake night sky.

Foreign films shown here are dubbed, however, so if you don’t want to practise your French, continue on to Les Coulisses du Rex next door. The Coulisses presents guided “Stars of the Rex” tours in English, a happy ending to a flick through Paris’ cinemas.