Vision: Claesson Koivisto Rune
Eero Koivisto:
"As this is a contemporary luxury hotel catering primarily to modern business travelers, we have really made an effort to use our own experience as professional travelers, thinking every detail through from the guest's perspective, picking up things we like in hotels around the world while avoiding all the irritating details that can be so annoying when you're on the road. For fifteen years now, we've been touring the world pursuing careers as architects and product designers, living in hotels every week, so our experience in this field is quite extensive. We really know exactly what we love and what we hate. Sometimes when you're staying in hotels, very fancy ones as they may be, you wonder whether the architects who designed them have ever stayed in a hotel themselves."
Mårten Claesson:
"Traveling for pleasure a few times a year is one thing, but when you do it every week, getting up at four in the morning to catch the red-eye flight, then sitting in meetings all day long and going out for a business dinner before you finally get to go back to the hotel — then you really know what you want from that hotel and your room. Staying in hotels is something that's forced upon you, so it should at least feel good and soothing, really comfortable and relaxing for all the senses. The fewer nuisances, the better. Design gimmicks as seen in so many hotels over the past decade or more, like a giant log painted in gold in the lobby, for example, are usually amusing the first time you visit the hotel. The next time, they're less amusing. The third time, you just want to throw the damned thing out — if you ever come back that many times, that is."
Ola Rune:
"When you have little time to spend in your hotel room, it's important that everything is functioning well and easily accessible. Every detail is crucial. That's why, for this hotel, we can spend a week discussing the position and functions of a lamp in a corner somewhere."
Eero Koivisto:
"Old classic hotels always have their own special ambiance that is usually quite enjoyable. As we build this new hotel in two historic buildings, we have the chance to create something with such an atmosphere from the outset, which is one of our main ambitions in our design. The real challenge is achieving this effect while at the same time being modern, edgy, sharp and contemporary, without the standard features of most traditional luxury hotels — the gold, the velvet, the thick red carpets and all that. We've worked both with and against the buildings in achieving the effects that we want here."
Ola Rune:
"From the beginning, we've been inspired by the appearance of Stockholm, not in the summer when the light is bright and magical, but in the wintertime, when the light is softer and contrasts lower. When you look at a picture of the city skyline in winter, without sunlight, it first appears almost monochrome, almost black and white. It's only when you look closer that you see the subtle, kind of muffled colors and soft shadows. This is the effect that we want to create in this hotel. The general impression should be calm and relaxing, devoid of strong and aggressive, dominant contrasts and gimmicks, but then there will be plenty of clever and beautiful details and surprises to discover with time."
Eero Koivisto:
"Also, we're using a lot of patterns in this hotel. Patterns are fascinating. Fundamentally, they've always been very similar in all cultures and historical eras, all around the world. We've created a series of new, modern ones exclusively for this hotel. They're all subtle, more or less monochrome designs that from a distance will appear as a solid surface. Only when you get closer will you see the actual shapes and contours."
Mårten Claesson:
"In the rooms, and in the rest of the hotel, we've worked with the ambition of creating interiors of the kind that you would encounter in a private home, assembled over a longer period of time. It sounds simple, but it's far from easy to achieve this effect in a hotel. It takes a lot of care and effort, for example by carefully selecting products from different manufacturers and designers, instead of many products from one and the same brand which will give that `corporate´ feel that we're trying very hard to avoid."
Ola Rune:
"This doesn't mean that all rooms should be different, however. That's s another gimmick that's been a big trend in hotels lately, which we'd like to `kill´ here. As a professional traveler, you want to find a hotel that you like to return to, as close to a home away from home that you can get. That's the kind of hotel this should be. Then you don't want a completely different room each time you return. You want to have at least a general idea of where everything is, how everything works and feels. We're fully confident that people will like this hotel, like the rooms, and want to return to them, not to something completely different every time."
Eero Koivisto:
"Contemporary Swedish design is very good and clever, but there's often been something a bit coarse and rough to it. Our ambition is to bring elegance back, in the sense as defined by classic Danish modernist designers such as Kjaerholm, Jacobsen and Wegner, and Finnish Saarinen. It's not just about elegance, though, but even more about the content, the functions, the ideas behind the products and the solutions, the choice of materials, how everything connects and relates to one another. If the product doesn't contain those dimensions, it'll be hollow. It's about dignity, too — like when you see a really cool, hip, well dressed elderly person with his or her own strong and personal, comfortable, confident style and swagger, as you do most frequently in Italy and France, and also in London. That's the feeling we like to communicate —that kind of dignity and self-confidence. With this hotel, we want to define a timeline, and create a relation between past and present times."
Eero Koivisto:
"Staying in a hotel is an experience that starts at the entrance, moves through the lobby and the hallways, finally ending up in the room, your own private cell. Usually, there's at least some weak link along that chain of experiences. We have to orchestrate that string of impressions, make it into something out of the ordinary, something worth-while."