Authors Estudio Além (Paula Navarro Mazón, Filipe Nunes Faustino)
Location Girona, Spain
Year 2019-2021
Client Private
Surface 460sqm
Fill this form to have the opportunity to join the New Generations platform: submissions will be reviewed on a daily-basis, and the most innovative practices will have the chance to be part of the media's coverage and participate in our cultural agenda, including events, research projects, workshops, exhibitions and publications.
New Generations is a European platform that investigates the changes in the architectural profession ever since the economic crisis of 2008. We analyse the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production.
Since 2013, we have involved more than 300 practices from more than 20 European countries in our cultural agenda, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats. We aim to offer a unique space where emerging architects could meet, exchange ideas, get inspired, and collaborate.
A project by Itinerant Office
Within the cultural agenda of New Generations
Editor in chief Gianpiero Venturini
Editorial team Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera
Copyediting and Proofreading Akshid Rajendran
If you have any questions, need further information, if you'd like to share with us a job offer, or just want to say hello please, don't hesitate to contact us by filling up this form. If you are interested in becoming part of the New Generations network, please fill in the specific survey at the 'join the platform' section.
Estudio Além was commissioned to rework the interior of an existing hotel in Girona, Spain. They looked for formal simplicity and a contemporary, timeless and serene image, with rooms reduced to the essentials.
The previous state showed a hotel from the early 80s, with a mundane structure, configuration and image, outdated and without character.
The interior renovation could not expand or reduce the number of rooms (17 rooms and a common area) but it could improve them and, as a result, the guest experience.
In a single gesture, a central, curved element in the floor plan facilitates access to the rooms and improves their interior quality while adapting the establishment to the current accessibility regulations.
The distribution of the spaces was simplified in order to optimise the areas destined for the rooms and to reduce the previous design’s complexity of the hallway layout and flow of movement as much as possible.
Simplicity was also key for this project that required a very controlled intervention, had a very tight budget and had to be durable and resistant to the high traffic derived from its continuous use.
With the aim of creating a sense of timelessness, between tradition and contemporaneity, the hotel was able to provide a symbolic response to the city in which it is located.
Every material in the hotel seeks to offer the neutrality and warmth of the colors found in the stone of Girona’s cathedral, the heart of the city.
An exercise in balance and equilibrium, the project strove to ensure that all the elements would form part of the same language, promoting a dialogue between geometric clarity and a more serene neutrality thanks to the materials and tones selected.
Only interrupted by the pinkish and amber glimmers, lively and changing, of the metals covering the pillars so that the columns emerge, like flowers, in a tribute to the city and its delicate celebration of spring.
Extreme attention was paid to the details, ensuring every element fit perfectly, in order to introduce a layer of craftsmanship in the spaces to humanise them and turn the hotel into something like a home, albeit a temporary one.
For the designers, craftsmanship adds subtlety, uniqueness, the comfort of home and above all, quality.
The storage units for the rooms, room numbers, and welcome cards were all designed and created from scratch.
The precise selection of materials and furniture elements, the neutrality of every room’s warm greys, the textile softness of the continuous flooring, the imperfect texture of the wall cladding and the rigorous work of lighting control are some of the decisions that reinforce the sequence of intimate and welcoming atmospheres throughout the hotel’s refurbished floors.
Authors Estudio Além (Paula Navarro Mazón, Filipe Nunes Faustino)
Location Girona, Spain
Year 2019-2021
Client Private
Surface 460sqm