The design team just had to look around at the industrial heritage of the harbour quarter of Hamburg for inspiration for this hotel, but it also looked further afield – to Manchester’s legendary Hacienda

Details

Client: 25hours Hotel Company
Design: Stephen Williams Associates
Size: 6,600 sq m
Completion time: 18 months

Project Details

When German architecture practice Stephen Williams Associates took on the design of the 25hours hotel in Hamburg's Hafencity district it looked to the industrial heritage of the area's harbour for ideas, using graphics inspired by metal shipping containers and loading bays in the interior. But founder and principal architect Stephen Williams, who was born and brought up in the UK and is now based in Germany, also drew inspiration from further away: legendary Manchester nightclub The Hacienda.

'I used to go to The Hacienda,' Williams explains, 'and I loved the way Ben Kelly, the designer, used industrial markings and materials. The interior of the club was tough and industrial, but if you looked at the details you'd see it was perfectly crafted and the proportions were elegant. We tried to do something similar with 25hours Hotel Hafencity: taking an industrial aesthetic and making it elegant.'

The six-storey, 170-room hotel, in a new build that wasn't originally destined to be a hotel, also has a 100-seat restaurant, bar, rooftop sauna, art gallery, private wharf, and a meeting room housed in a repurposed shipping container. It is part of a redevelopment project, that is replacing disused warehouses in Hamburg's old harbour quarter with restaurants, shops, bars and offices. It is also the third hotel opened by the 25hours Hotel Company, with sister establishments in Frankfurt and Wien and a fourth due to open in Zurich next year. The company likes to take an individual approach to the design of its hotels by commissioning different architects and designers for each one and encouraging them to give each hotel a sense of place rather than trying to interpret an overarching brand.

To Williams, the hotel's location means it is well placed to attract a broad range of people, from backpackers to businesspeople, as well as those visiting Hamburg for its many theatres. 'It's a totally inclusive hotel in terms of the people who stay there, and that's a design challenge because you need to create architecture that doesn't exclude anybody,' he says.

The easy way to design a hotel 'suitable' for everyone is to make the interior bland and inoffensive, but Williams says that isn't necessary and that there's no reason to assume bold design won't appeal to a clientele of all ages and backgrounds.

The industrial aesthetic is most prevalent on the ground floor, particularly in the restaurant, lobby and meeting room. Here, Williams and his team left most of the ceiling works exposed and painted yellow loading-bay-style graphics on to floors of black, rubberized concrete. The meeting space is separated from the lobby by a wall made from the side of a reclaimed shipping container. At the touch of a button the wall can be raised electronically to give access to the meeting space.

A shipping container's sides are also used to create a 'tough' aesthetic in the gym and sauna on the top floor, which also has a skylight window that opens to the elements. 'It's open at the top so that when you come out of the sauna you're standing in the open air,' says Williams. If it rains 'it rains in there, so it feels quite tough - not like a spa at all'.

The restaurant/bar is designed to appeal to a wide range of people and Williams says it draws a large crowd, particularly at weekends. Chairs and tables can be removed to create a large dance floor after restaurant hours, and Williams says one of the most popular places to sit is on a pile of Persian rugs placed at the centre of the restaurant floor and referencing the rugs that used to be imported in huge quantities via the harbour for trade across Europe.

The hotel lives up to its name (almost) with a smoking lounge on the first floor which is open around the clock. For here Williams and his team created a more relaxed and homely feel with bespoke wooden shelves stacked with hundreds of vinyl records and a natural-look timber floor. In the centre is a bespoke wooden seating unit with built-in record players and headphones.

This comfortable, homely vibe continues into a non-smoking lounge, also on the first floor. This area features second-hand furniture and found objects, including a surfboard and an assortment of cymbals sourced by Connie Kotte, a set designer based in Hamburg who has worked with the practice on several projects. 'She knows all the places in Holland and Belgium where they have tonnes of this stuff,' says Williams, 'but she never tells us exactly where she gets it from!'

The guest rooms range in size from 14 sq m to 34 sq m and some - designed for affluent backpackers - even have bunk beds designed by Stephen Williams Associates. 'For the rooms we were inspired by a nautical theme, so we used lots of dark wood,' says Williams. Many of the rooms also have a drawing of a semi-naked man or woman on the wall. These, Williams says, are inspired by the kind of drawings sailors might have done themselves on the walls of their cabins.

For Williams, this project proves that a hotel doesn't need to be bland to suit a variety of people, but he says he and his team would never have had the chance to prove that without such a willing client.

'The developer had certain financial constraints,' he says. 'So the challenge was to convince the developer- who then had to convince the banks - that to build an interior like this is actually commercially viable. At first I think they wanted it to look quite bland and for us get all the furniture from one supplier.'

Eventually, though, design won through and the hotel won the travel and leisure design award for best large hotel at this year's Hotel Forum in Munich.

'That's not just a design prize,' Williams points out. 'It's also a prize for real estate as investment, so it means that our design helped to make the hotel financially viable.

'In terms of bookings it's been hugely successful and that shows you that being daring and even a little bit subversive - even using influences from Rhe Hacienda - can create a hotel that's commercially successful.'

This article was first published in fx Magazine.