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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.'
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By Suzanne Stephens
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
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