RECEPTION
Welcome As I write, I am sat in a canalside café in Amsterdam
admiring the ingenuity of the architects who created the 17th century mansions that line the city’s waterways.
COVER STORY: The Sofitel Stephansdom in Vienna is Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel’s latest architectural masterpiece. In contrast to the brightly coloured murals of the public areas, guestrooms are designed in monochromatic colour schemes of white, grey or black, or as Nouvel describes, “non-colours”.
The designers and housebuilders of the Grachtengordel had to comply with a strict and detailed set of planning regulations – not least one that stipulated every building plot must be thirty feet wide by two hundred deep. This resulted in the glorious sweeps of physically uniform, yet aesthetically individual houses that define Amsterdam’s popular image. But it also posed serious challenges for architects who had to provide the luxury their wealthy merchant clients expected within a tightly constricted footprint. Creative solutions included building single houses with two different frontages, or connecting two separate houses via hidden corridors. The hotel I am staying at, Canal House, is a new boutique property located in one of those archetypal tall, narrow mansions. Its designers Concrete have had to be just as creative with their use of space as their forebears. Check in happens around the back of the bar, and some rooms are accessed via a Goodfellas-style back-of-house walk through the kitchens. Concrete have proven themselves willing to challenge design conventions in other, more modern hospitality environments. At the Supper Club – one of their earlier projects – gourmet diners slouch supine on daybeds, not straight backed at a starched cloth table. At W London Leicester Square, their rethinking of the traditional guestroom layout sees the sink combined with the desk and dressing table in one Corian unit in the heart of the room. And their award-winning designs for CitizenM pushed the boundaries of how a compact hotel room could still be considered a luxurious one. Such innovations don’t always work. They challenge guests to change their behaviour patterns and clients their modus operandi. Regardless, I applaud any designer willing to challenge readily accepted conventions of design. The Dutch designers of old didn’t always get it right either (who else would have built a city on wooden stilts) but you could never accuse them of being narrow minded.
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Editor Matt Turner
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