MAKING A BIGGER SPLASH.
Luxury with personality: the Westin Hotel in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall unites first-rate service with spectacular architecture. The modern interiors were created by Berlin designer Tassilo Bost. An interview.
TASSILO BOST,
Senior Director of the Bost Group Berlin, won numerous awards for the interior design of the Westin Hotel in the Elbphilharmonie, most recently the Build Architecture Award 2017.
Mr Bost, how do you create a hotel ambiance that makes guests feel at home?
Guests appreciate and expect a certain atmospheric richness. To achieve this it is important to carefully question every single detail, refine and condense it down to its essential core. Ultimately, there are so many details that contribute to the guests’ perceived well-being.
Every detail signals
regard and respect.
Can you give us some examples?
Take, for instance, the desks in the bedrooms. The front edge of the top is curved and resembles a stylised wave, symbolising the flow of the River Elbe which flows around the building. This wave motif crops up in many details throughout the hotel Guests love elements like these. Aesthetics and emotional effectiveness are the building bricks that create good design, and good detail solutions form the foundation.
What is special about the bathrooms in the Westin Hotel Hamburg?
The bedrooms have gigantic panoramic windows that offer a stunning view of the Elbe and the port. To offer this view from the bathroom, too, we also put a large internal window next to the bath, letting you look through the bedroom and out of the main window. In the designer bathrooms, we used the same wooden surface that was used in the bedroom, and which also features throughout the hotel. The bathroom door, opened at a 90° angle, closes the toilet area. These are the first prefabricated bathrooms built with such meticulous attention to design and detail. The standard bathrooms are prefabricated bathroom pods with baths and showers that were slotted into the building shell before the façade was built.
You chose KALDEWEI products for all the bathrooms. Was there a particular reason?
We love using KALDEWEI’s products because they have such a timeless design and can be integrated in a wide range of different design concepts. Apart from the aesthetic quality, there’s another factor that was decisive for us: the functional quality. Our bathrooms embody longevity. Another important aspect was the degree of understanding KALDEWEI has for the problems an interior designer has to overcome along the path to the perfect designer bathroom.
