The Play & Display project by FOUR O NINE studio in Shanghai has won Eurostars Hotel Lab, the First Innovation and Design Contest of Hotel Spaces, launched at the beginning of the year by Eurostars Hotels.
The work by the Chinese studio, which will receive a cash prize of €8,000, has won the contest due to its original development of the floor plan that uses the bed as the room’s main element, around which revolve all the activities a client might do during their stay. The jury emphasised the originality of the project, which avoids the usual layout of the different areas inside a room -sleeping, working, reading areas, etc.- to integrate them in a central island where complementary furniture has been added, only excluding the bathroom area and luggage carrier.
In addition, the jury has named two runners-up that will receive €1,500 each. Namely, the Box of Choice project submitted by Integrated Field studio from Bangkok; and the Square One project by Magdalena Viegener, Santiago Peña and Agustín Llobera from Buenos Aires.
Eurostars Hotel Lab is the first design contest of hotel spaces promoted by a Spanish hotel chain, which strengthens Hotusa Group’s permanent commitment to innovation. In the first edition a total of 135 projects were submitted from different countries, such as Spain, Italy, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Israel, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Poland.
In this first edition, the participants had to submit the design of a hotel room containing a double bed and headboard, wardrobe, luggage carrier and workspace. They had the freedom to add any extra features considered appropriate and could also redesign the available space inside the room.
A jury made up of professional design and interior design experts had the task of selecting the winning projects, taking into account the use of new materials and solutions to comply with innovation criteria; functionality of the designed elements; feasibility of being able to apply the design to the reality of the hotels in the chain and originality: that the elements being evaluated had not previously been used in an earlier project.
The winning studio
Andrei Zerebecky and Lukasz Kos co-founded FOUR O NINE studio in 2011, in Shanghai, and right from the beginning it has attracted considerable attention all around the world. Their work explores the limits between prosaic and poetic elements.
Zerebecky and Kos’ projects have been recognised all over the world by leading design editors in North America, Europe and Asia, and their work has been exhibited in Canada, Germany and China. Both partners graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design of Toronto, and studied in Los Angeles, Rome, Krakow and Amsterdam. After attaining a Master’s Degree in Architecture, they worked in prestigious international studios of architecture and design, including the firms headed by Frank Gehry and Bruce Mau.
