Hospitality Design - July 2012 - 112

Suzanne Oxenaar and Otto Nan
Founders, Hotel The Exchange, Loyd Hotel, and Llove Hotel, Netherlands
For two people with no background in hotels, Suzanne Oxenaar and Otto Nan sure have made headlines with their three unconventional concepts. Maybe it’s because the former modern art curator and art party organizer look at hotels differently. “For me, rooms are also temporary spaces, which [become] your laboratory while you are staying there,” says Oxenaar. “A hotel is really a living place.” Take their first venture, the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam’s Eastern Docklands in 2004. Designed with traveling artists in mind, guestrooms range from 1-Star (with a shared bathroom) to spacious 5-Star (one with a bed that sleeps eight) accommodations “so that whether you are an art student or an arrived artist, you can all be in the same hotel,” Oxenaar explains, adding that the renovation of the former immigrant hotelturned-prison was a collaboration between various Dutch designers, with much of the restoration done by local architecture firm MVRDV. And to bring art to the forefront, the nonprofit Cultural Embassy hosts an evolving program of exhibitions, readings, and lectures at the hotel, including a library filled with more than 1,700 art monographs. Taking the art-hotel concept on the road, the duo, with the help of architect Jo Nagasaka, created the Llove Hotel in Tokyo, a one-month exhibition in 2010—complete with a café, shop, theater, and library— where guests could actually stay. Rooms—designed by a select handful of Japanese and Dutch designers—varied from the fantastical, where a bed crawls up the wall, to the unexpected, with trees and furniture buried in white pebbles. “Because it was temporary it gave us the opportunity to play again,” Oxenaar says. They are still playing. For their latest, Hotel The Exchange, which opened in December, Oxenaar and Nan turned three historic buildings on Amsterdam’s main drag, the Damrak, into a fashion statement. “The street is called the ‘red carpet’ of the city,” explains Oxenaar, “but when we were standing there looking at one of the busiest streets in the Netherlands, it looked more like a catwalk.” Partnering with the American Fashion Institute (AMFI), eight students and alumni, in conjunction with Dutch studio INA MATT, dressed the rooms as if they were models, each one based on a fashion metaphor. The walls of one are done in giant pleats. Another is an ode to Marie Antoinette, with a giant hoop skirt covering the bed and corset-inspired paneling and lacing running up the walls. Even the reception desk looks like a handbag. What’s next for the pair is unclear, but Oxenaar says they aren’t ruling out another hotel project: “It was never our aim to get into hotels, but it has been so inspiring.” hd

Clockwise from above left: Unconventional hoteliers Suzanne Oxenaar and Otto Nan; one of the 5-Star guestrooms at the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam (photo by Allard Van Der Hoek); and Hotel The Exchange’s “Eighties Room” by Roos Soetekouw, dressed in an oversized black and white patterned sweater and a rainbow-colored tube skirt, both crafted in the Textile Lab of the Textielmuseum in Tilburg, Netherlands, along with many of the hotel’s fabrics (photo by Mirjam Bleeker).

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - July 2012
