Tuve Hotel: 2015 BoY Winner for City Hotel
Call it a calculated reaction against the mass-marketing of luxury. Or the ultimate respite from a bustling, sweltering tropical metropolis. This powerfully quiet boutique hotel was inspired by a location on the opposite side of the world: a foggy, rocky lake in the Swedish town of Tuve as seen through the lens of a Danish photographer. The hotel’s owners brought those images to the very first meeting with firm director Wai Ming Lam.
He took it from there, translating their dark mystery into a meticulous crafted language incorporating hammered marble and acid-etched brass and carbon-steel. Guests enter through a tunnel in fiberglass-reinforced board-formed concrete. Natural brass, topping the reception desk, gets polished by guests’ fingerprints, while LED rays, projected through a louvered steel partition, radiate across the heavily veined marble floor. The restaurant’s doors are aluminum honeycomb panels clad in that acid-etched carbon-steel. Rifts in the cast-concrete walls of the 66 guest rooms—accidental crevices that might otherwise be considered imperfections—are glammed up with gold flakes. Mysterious blond oak boxes appear against the wall of most of the rooms. Swing the front panel open to reveal not only a snack station but also a desk and an accompanying chair.
Project Team: Kent Wong; Phoebe Chu; Xing Zhang; Kurt Chung; Huanhuan Fang.
