The Hotel
Switzerland
Jean Nouvel

A panoply of optical and spatial effects enrich a small luxury hotel renovation

© Philippe Ruault

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

In Jean Nouvel's luxury 25-room hotel and 70-seat restaurant in Lucerne, the guest rooms (generally 382 to 578 square feet) are designed to be sensually modernist and comfortably spare. The Hotel offers guest rooms with deeply burnished wide-plank wood floors and push-button-operated blinds inserted between two panes of glass. Nouvel designed all the sleekly modular furniture to be wrapped in matte stainless steel, with horizontal surfaces topped in a Jatoba (Brazilian cherry) wood. The ceiling is another story—indeed it is the story. For here Nouvel selected stills from 25 films by directors ranging from Bunuel and Fellini to David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, and had them printed and mounted to the ceiling.

Downstairs, Nouvel opened up the public spaces by having the lobby occupy one-half of the ground floor with the bar and restaurant in a stacked arrangement on the other half: The bar occupies a mezzanine overlooking the lobby, while the restaurant is carved out of the lower level. Entering the lobby you can peer down into the restaurant through a low glass window; however, the mezzanine bar is concealed behind a high, black parapet wall. The subterranean restaurant, with its black pigmented walls, receives a striking amount of daylight via vertical slots of space around the perimeter that extend up past the mezzanine bar to the double-height ceiling. At street level, Nouvel installed floor-to-ceiling windows, which are canted inward. Below grade, the windows are optically extended by two mirrored panels placed at angles to both refract daylight into the restaurant, as well as reflect fragments of the outdoor scenery above.

See the May 2001 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of building:
The Hotel

Location:
Sempacherstrasse 14
CH-6002 Lucerne
Switzerland
www.the-hotel.ch

Gross square footage:
15,000 sq ft

Total construction cost:
$4.9 million

Owner:
Urs Karli
Hotel Schiller Betriebe AG
Pilatusstrasse 15
CH-6002 Lucerne

Architect's firm:
Jean Nouvel