HOTEL JUAN CARLOS I SUITE | External Reference

Type of project: Hotel Project: Royal Suite Hotel Juan Carlos I Location: Barcelona, Spain Status: Basic design Handing over date of basic project: January 2009 Client: HUSA Built up area: 500 m2 Project team: N. Toribio, C. Zappulla with M. Tepedino Collaborators: Marina Cella, Primo Marsili, Iris Perouliou, Ilektra Simantira, Albert Bonanova Budget: 400.000 € When the director of the renowned Spanish hotels company Husa launched this restricted competition we understood immediately that it was going to be a challenging and contradictory project. We were asked to design the new interiors for the last-floor royal suite, the room where the king sleeps during his journeys in Barcelona. We suddenly asked ourselves if really existed a contemporary image for luxury. Before responding to the previous question we faced the main contradiction of the project, we had to plan a new spatial configuration within a really tight budget and using materials and shapes which his majesty would have found as appropriate. Even if disappointed by the request, we decided to give to warm and high quality materials a contemporary configuration, in other words, if wood and marble are well recognized as being luxury materials, his highness could have accepted to see them in a contemporary configuration. According to this first consideration we determined the main functional areas and defined them through elements which maintained physical and visual continuity. We wrapped these spaces with a continuous band which folded and twisted according to the different functions and accesses. In these way we provided any part of the suite with different spatial devices as false ceilings, visual filters, partitions, still using a single architectural element. This device was made of noble dark woods while, for the rest of the elements, we used metal, Carrara marble, shiny and bright resins. We hoped his majesty the king, and the client, would forgive us being that brave in the definition of the shapes. Possibly contemporary luxury is, and used to be, the ultimate combination of what is considered being rare and up-to-date.