10 Highlights from Sleep + Eat London
As Europe’s hospitality design community headed to
London on November 20-21 for Sleep + Eat at the
Olympia London exhibition center, the continent’s hotel industry continued to experience record growth,
with occupancy, rates, and total guest room revenue at their highest
since 2011, according to accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers. The annual hospitality design trade
show recently added ‘Eat’ to its name for a new focus on
restaurants and bars. As in previous years, the event offered
designers the opportunity to create concept spaces—Sleep and Eat
Sets—that offer a glimpse at what the future holds for hospitality
design. This year, the designers each collaborated with a non-hotel
brand, ranging from London’s Natural History Museum to a local soccer
club. Here are 10 of our favorite finds, including a concept nightclub that pays tribute to London’s clubs and a bathroom with a jungle bursting out of its walls.
A crackdown on licensing has shuttered many of London’s legendary
clubs. Designer Shalini Misra‘s Eat Set
gives the genre a 1980s-inspired tribute with the Technostalgia Nightclub,
a celebration of neon colors, geometric patterns, glossy surfaces,
and optical illusions.
Proving white porcelain isn’t the only basin in town, bathroom
manufacturer Alape introduces Terra and Aqua—a series of matte and glossy sink finishes—for a total of eight new nature-inspired hues.
What happens when a designer teams up with a soccer club? In the case
of this Sleep Set by Angela Dapper, partner at Denton Corker Marshall, deep claret lacquered walls
contrasting with a sunny yellow-lacquered bathroom. Those are the team
colors of London’s West Ham United.
A lush jungle of hanging plants bursts from the walls—papered in Tropical Clouded
Leopard by Timourous Beasties—at the Sleep Set by Hirsch Bedner Associates in association with the
Natural History Museum of London.
Dessert is a guilty pleasure—and so is a selfie. Or so thought Ed Ng
and Terence Ngan, cofounders at AB Concept.
At their Sleep Set, created in partnership with French pastry chef and
chocolatier Pierre Hermé, perfectly
decadent pastries (some real, others fake yet ingeniously smelling
real) are revealed in hidden nooks of a winding space centered by a
selfie-focused seating area. Here, flattering lighting combines with
wall-mounted macaroon-like circular mirrors above a curved sofa.
Rolling this polished aluminum and matte-black fabric sculptural disc—the Beosound Edge wireless speaker by Michael Anastassiades
for Bang & Olufsen—forwards or backwards
ingeniously adjusts the volume.
For his Cosmos light for Quasar Holland, Jan
Pauwels designed grids of brass to stand alone or mesh together to
illuminate wider surface areas. Brass’s status as a conducting
material means no wires are needed for the tiny pinhead LEDs.
Architect and designer Yasmine Mahmoudieh‘s collaboration with Penguin Books led to a
bathroom of completely custom furnishings inspired by “Elizabeth and
Her German Garden,” a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim first published in
1898.
Through an exploration of natural dying processes, Crème founder Jun Aizaki developed timber
dyed a dusty indigo blue, which he used to distinguish the Sleeper
Bar, an Eat Set serving as a centrally-located meeting point.
Starling murmuration is captured in the canvas-dyed injection carpet
Upward Tile VT47745, part of the Synchronize collection from Shaw Hospitality.
