Design and architecture practice Jestico + Whiles’s design for Andels Hotel, Lodz may have been a challenge, but the final scheme owes much of its charm to this building’s somewhat unusual footprint, and is a long way from those identikit hotel chains.

Key facts

PROJECT: Andels Lodz
DESIGN: Jestico +Whiles
ARCHITECTURE: OP Architekten
CLIENT: Warimpex/UBM
SIZE: 19,000 sq m
COMPLETION TIME: Two years

Project description

As with the Berlin project, this building imposed its own character on Jestico +Whiles’s fifth interior for the Andels hotel chain. This time it was a former textiles factory in Lodz, Poland, built in 1852 and abandoned in the late 1990s.

‘It was sort of an upside-down brief’, says head designer James Dilley. ‘The building is incredibly long and thin, so we had to design the hotel around the building, rather than the other way around’. But as with the Andels Berlin, the imposing building has created a characterful space.

Jestico +Whiles worked with executive architect OP Architekten: ‘They were great,’ says Dilley of his Polish counterparts. ‘We worked closely with them throughout the whole project’.

Approaching the hotel’s main entrance, you can look up to see a cantilevered glass box containing a swimming pool, which overhangs the building’s imposing brick facade.

‘I have to tell you that the swimming pool was the idea of OP Architekten’, says Dilley. And it’s a great idea. In much the same way as the brightly lit Sky Bar at the Andels Berlin, this glass block acts as a sort of beacon – enticingly visible from the busy street below.

Guests enter a vast lobby, containing a reception desk, bar and cafe where original iron columns support a redbrick vaulted ceiling. ‘With Berlin, we were given the shell of the building, but everything had been newly finished. Here, we had to retain the original finishes as much as possible,’ says Dilley.

Piercing the brick ceiling is an atrium, dominated by sculptural features made from circles of concrete, which encompass the balustrades of the floors above ground. Each circle has been lit with colour changing LED tubes. Below each of these ellipses are carpeted islands with furniture by Fritz Hanson.

The vastness of the lobby area could have been daunting without a few well-placed visual markers; one is an eye-shaped bar with a violet glass display, backlit by LEDs. Opposite this, a long reception desk has a sandblasted glass front, also backlit.

In the cafe area, a local artist has painted factory scenes, inspired by the building’s previous incarnation, directly on to concrete walls, and banquette seating in this area is upholstered in blue leather.

Off of from the lobby is the restaurant, another long rectangle with an exposed brick wall at the back. Over the years this has been roughly filled in with concrete, giving it a distressed, textural appearance.

Long leather banquettes sit back to back. ‘We wanted to find some really interesting chairs for this area’, says Dilley, so we sent people out to scout around Poland’. Each one is different, and includes some of classic café chairs by architect and designer Joseph Hoffman.

As with the shape of the building, the long narrow rooms, 180 in all, were a challenge to design, though they do benefit from high ceilings.

‘We had to choose furniture that would make the rooms feel as spacious as possible’, says Dilley. Exposed brickwork has been used wherever possible and a range of textiles, some of which were actually produced in the factory, are another nod to the building’s history.

The design may have been a challenge, but the final scheme owes much of its charm to this building’s somewhat unusual footprint, and is a long way from those identikit hotel chains.