Design showcase: top five projects with materials taken to the next level

This week’s collaboration with TOPHOTELDESIGN showcases the top five hotel developments utilising materials in the most creative and inspirational ways.

This week we’re taking a look into projects where designers successfully expressed materials’ maximum capabilities, taking into consideration complexity, creativity, innovation and taste.

Exploring sophisticated limits

Taste is indeed subjective, but the trained eye can tell whether or not a designer had a specific aesthetic in mind and if their taste matched their goals.

These five projects are exceptional in every way, taking commonly used materials and exploring their limits without losing sophistication.

A meticulously designed bamboo lodge, as indicated by its name, takes bamboo to places we’ve never seen before, creating intricate delicate patterns that transform the usual straight orthogonal lines into a curved space where walls and ceiling are continuous.

Hotel Terrestre uses bricks from the inside out, creating a facade that both follows the original lines of typical brick proportions while elevating the casual material into a futuristic and brutalist unique facade.

While Hotel Bohinj uses multiple long wood cuts with slanted edges to create artistic masterpieces that emerge from the ceiling while maintaining that same wooden texture throughout the whole hotel. Libertine Lindenberg uses bespoke ceramics designed by the interior designers themselves to produce geometric topographies that play with scale and light in wonderfully textured ways.

Elsewhere, Jam Hotel takes concrete and takes it from its usual most-used material form and elevates it to tremendous sculptural installations that integrate into the basic foundation of the building.

Click on the images below and explore the projects in further detail.

A Meticulously Designed Bamboo Lodge

Yibin, China
by QAD

Hotel Terrestre

Puerto Escondido, Mexico
by Taller de Arquitectura – TAX

Hotel Bohinj

Bohinj, Slovenia
by OFIS arhitekti

Image by © Žiga Intihar

Libertine Lindenberg

Frankfurt, Germany
by Studio ABERJA

JAM Hotel

Brussels, Belgium
by Lionel Jadot

Image by © Oana Crainic

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