Hotel Royal | Arkan Zeytinoglu Architects

The *****Hotel Royal was given a totally new design, which is based on a new interpretation that combines a modern hotel concept with a hint of nostalgia. The hotel is located in the centre of Opatija, directly beside the sea on one of Croatia’s most famous promenades lungomare.

Elegance and nostalgia
The new Hotel Royal is erected on the site of an existing building. Together with the Villa Kamelija the *****hotel forms a new ensemble, in which history, in the form of the existing square and buildings that can be ascribed to the world of Italian architecture, and the conservation authorities’ requirements were integrated in a new concept. The hotel consists of generously dimensioned public areas with lobby, lounge restaurant and a two storey garage as well as the bedroom floors with 54 guest rooms. The aim was to establish a relationship to the imperial history in terms of aesthetics and tradition and to reinterpret it.

The building was discretely inserted in an existing park landscape using an appropriate sense of scale. The new building is intended to establish a link between tradition, in the best sense of the term, and the present day. The building is close to Angiolina Park and demonstrates respect towards its immediate neighbours and towards the glorious past. References were consciously made to famous personalities from the world of music, literature, sciences (the Vienna Circle) and art (Gustav Mahler, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Albert Einstein and the celebrated American dancer Isadora Duncan). The nobility of this era and its refined elegance provided the parameters for a new interpretation of a present day hotel concept combined with a hint of nostalgia.

In the interior this connection to history is reflected in the club-like quality of the spaces – such as, for example, the lobby bar which is directly adjoined by the library. In the light-flooded lower ground floor, which opens onto the promenade, there is a Viennese ballroom for 500 people – and 3 salon areas, the Yellow Salon (breakfast room), the à la carte restaurant (Green Salon) and the coffee-bar (Red Salon).

Building volume
The building is conceived as a white urban villa in a green park. In response to the proportions of the surrounding buildings the enormous length of the new building was divided into two volumes. The design principles of buildings from the 1930s, which were employed on the Italian Riviera until the 1960s, have been developed further here in a contemporary way – a reminiscence of the heyday of this town, a time when Opatija was an elegant, cultivated, and peaceful holiday location at the top of the European league.

Heritage
The building’s different functions can be read in the different stories. The plinth containing the public areas is emphasised by an arcade, as used in numerous buildings on the Italian Riviera. The openings on the floors that contain the guest rooms are well proportioned and alternate in a calm game played with size and position that refers to the classic aesthetic of architecture as found since the Renaissance, for example in Venice. The upper floors gain additional lightness as a result. The window sills also represent a new interpretation of an old stone mason tradition. Traditional external shutters give the facade, that is finished in white render with precisely made details, a certain plastic quality as the result of the shadows they cast.