Project | Hotel

IR-ON hostel is a renovation of a low rise building which its existing site is an unfinished of a typical service apartment.Our client in this project has a steel manufacturing business so we thought will be interesting if we could have adapted this material to be the key to design this project. We discussed in our team about “What is Thai?” and how to show them through using steel materials as well.
We found this wrought iron window that is basically typical using for a shop house in Thailand. When we look more in detail and do more research - we found that even they are so many patterns of them but somehow we can categorize them by grouping by their location. So we pick each interesting pattern in a different district in Bangkok, we rearrange them, experiment the rust effect on them and simply use them for cladding all exterior like a façade in order to conceal this old abandoned service apartment yet create a new very unique appearance for a customer to recognize this new hotel branding.
With the facade that is kind of an open frame that allow to have a green scape on the vertical wall as well. And this is a closer view for the main approach. About the interior detail, we try to convert an exterior element that we found in everyday life such as a shutter window - to give it a new function like a shelf door in the library area or partition in guestroom, etc.
Another challenge for us in this project is to using loose furniture instead of built-in furniture as much as possible.
According to archive the craftsmanship that one’s hope for so to deal with a Thai contractor is always my challenge. Because their craftsmanship is sometimes not that elaborate as we expect them to be. We try to resolve this problem by having a furniture artisan to do our mock-up of loose furniture at their studioso we can re-check with this mock-up before they start to make the whole objects.