The Hotel

A Sensual Anthology

The problem was that, in terms of luxury, in the world’s seventh most visited city, sumptuous lakeside establishments with 20-foot ceilings are too numerous to count. Something else had to be found to attract clients and prompt people to choose one hotel rather than another, an experience that turns a simple visit into something poetic. To create an impression of escape in classical and Renaissance palaces, ceilings were decorated with large paintings of mythological themes, usually greek. The idea here is to take the same concept and update it. Exit ancient Greece: what are today’s mythologies? Stories that everyone knows, that come to us from the cinema, because the cinema is our culture. The cultural dimension of a hotel is tied to desire, and the interpretation of painted ceilings is tied to eroticism. Thus, the hotel offers a cinematographic anthology of desire. Each room illustrates the beginning of a story into which the occupants are drawn, inducing a sense of belonging. And this is where luxury comes in: it is in the specific identity and the unusual care and attention put into the hotel. The Hotel celebrates simplicity and spirituality as much as it does elegance and refinement. The central idea is to create something quite unlike anything before and provide guests with a magical, exciting and unforgettable feeling. The Hotel is not just a place to sleep; it is a reinvention of the hotel experience for the new millennium.

Jean Nouvel