Hotels: Cool Living Spaces for Cosmopolitans

 
Four hotels, four worlds: in effect each of Kai Hollmann’s hotels is a separate cosmos with its own distinct aura, whether it has 3 or 4 stars or none. And yet all four unequal siblings speak a common language. Their message: please feel good! And this is well received by far more than the originally defined target group. Why is this the fact? Answers and takes on Hamburg, Germany’s design and hotel heartland.
 

 
They could hardly be more different: Gastwerk**** with its industrial charm, the exuberantly trendy 25 hours***, the unconventional Superbude and The George**** with its new British understatement. Their founding father, Kai Hollmann, has breathed life into all of them in the last nine years and got them up and running in his hometown Hamburg. All four fall into the design hotel category. Each is distinct in its own way,a lifestyle statement and customised hotel experience with loads of empathy for demanding cosmopolitans. Key (concept) design – Hollmann barely allows himself to pre empt it but still has problems with the construct. Too diffuse, too often misused, too cliché-laden, he thinks. His alternative: “I find lifestyle far more apt because it seeks to embody design like nothing else does.” Behind it lies the concept, that each style and lifestyle statement attracts a very specific audience. Thus each new project starts with the existential questions: who is it designed to appeal to – and what is it wecan do which is likely to achieve this? “Only if you find the right solutions to this can you hope to be successful in a market which is increasingly hard to penetrate,” the 52-year-old is convinced.
 
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| 13 August 2010 | Heike Hucht |