Looking for a break from the London cold to the even chillier Amsterdam the team at DC London stumbled across the following…
Located at Amsterdam’s Damrak, hotel The Exchange opened her doors last December. The project, led by Otto Nan en Suzanne Oxenaar, brings a unique collaboration between fashion and architecture, where one to five-star rooms are fit up like models. The duo is known from the Llove hotel in Tokyo, and the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy in Amsterdam. Through collaboration with Amsterdam Fashion Institute’s students and alumni, the hotel provides rooms named Unaware Reality, Building a View and Tailor’s Dummy. Fashion meets architecture in the most unexpected and inspiring way.
Eight AMFI students and alumni were selected to drive the vision of the hotel rooms. They created designs using fashion metaphors out of the design world. Each room is individually designed, but all with one vision: ‘the room is a body, a model’. From this perspective, the AMFI designers all created one or more unique and exceptional two-person suites. We picked our favourites:
Room 522 – Building a View by Anne Wolters
This room is dressed in a minimalist decoration, a sketch of a typical Amsterdam sight in a bulky cobalt-blue wool thread. Simple and effective, this graphic room embellishment, which reaches for the ceiling and runs across curtains, perfectly hides the room’s most awkward proportions.
Room 106 – The Pleats Room by Paul Hanraets
The ‘body’ in this unisex, dressed room feels almost disagreeably human. Inspired by the pleats and folds in a simple white T-shirt when worn, the walls of this room are fixed in a surreal composition of giant size pleats.
Room 322 – Wall Flowers by Iris Kloppenburg
Previously petit as this room is, it is embellished with paper flowers like a little girl’s prom dress. Not the romantic rose inspired bridal couture kind but rather conceptual corsages made to look just like the careless balls of paper the designer used in her sketch phase.
Room 418 – Crinoline by Sofie Sleumer
Getting under someone’s skirt never felt as delightful as in Sophie Sleumer’s The Crinoline Cage. The way she fit this nineteenth-century skirt shaped support structure into the tiny seventeenth-century attic room, pierced by massive wooden ridge beams, and still make it look like the delicate and tirelessly hand-sewn fashion miracle to fit a virgin wasp waist.
Hotel The Exchange – Damrak 50, Amsterdam
copy via ajanaku.com
images via judithdehaas.nl
