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Urban Villa
the World Of Hospitality
Urban Villa
Grzywinski+Pons Architects
U
rban Villa is a 100 room hotel in west
London. The property is unique in that it is
a hybridization of a boutique hotel offering
and an aparthotel — two programs that generally
are mutually exclusive. Our brief was to bring a
design-led bespoke hospitality feel to a product that is
traditionally anything but. An even bigger challenge
for us was to attempt to do this within a portion of a
newly built and largely residential tower (not of our
design) that we found to be rather prosaic and sterile.
We had to look hard to find any character within the
existing environment and, where possible, we tried
to peel back the layers that were at odds with our
intentions.
The first step of our intervention within the existing
building was subtractive — revealing structure
and services where we could. On the ground floor
we designed the reception to double as a full bar,
taking both cues and inspiration from traditional
English public houses — pubs — where historically
there were rooms to let and the barkeeper doubled
as an innkeeper. We chose a palette that is bright
and welcoming yet robust and functional — an
environment where it felt just as natural to ask for
extra towels as it would to order a cocktail.
The lobby also hosts a cafe we designed for the same
day-to-night mutability. A series of communal tables
and more private breakout spaces sit between screens
and under ceiling rafts. We wanted to balance the
abundant glazing and high ceil ings with vertical
breaks, warm and authentic materials, lush vegetation
and texture. The space, while legible, light washed and
convivial, is subtly apportioned into varying degrees of
public and private space though void of any walls.
In the guest rooms we had less latitude to reveal the
bones of the building so we focused on designing
custom furniture and a finish schedule that would be
congruent with the aforementioned public spaces. It
is also within the rooms that we tried to wed the scope
and amenities of an aparthotel with the aspirational
feel of a design forward hotel — employing what scope
we had to erase, or at least diminish, the palpable
legacy of a developer spec residence.
The nature and challenges of this commission were
unique for us and it is our hope that the spaces that
comprise Urban Villa feel quite divergent from those
which make up the rest of the building — that we
managed to create an atmosphere that belies its shell
and injected some heterogeneity into an otherwise
uniform environment.
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images courtesy of: Nicholas Way
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