Hospitality Design - September 2013 - 78

perspectives

trends art in hospitality

MGM Grand Sanya > MGM’s first non-gaming 5-Star hotel in

Mainland China came with a challenge: the new design had to incorporate
the structure of the former Gloria Hotel of which it inhabits, and at the
same time, the new property had to be double the size. “WATG cleverly
mirrored the footprint of the Gloria Hotel on the other half of the site and
the lobby—which the chairman mandated had to be the largest lobby
in Sanya—became the connection of these two wings,” says the hotel’s
designer, BBG-BBGM managing partner Julia Monk. With measuring
tapes in hand, she and the team toured other lobbies to determine what
the size needed to be—13,000 square feet. Inspired by the beauty of the
butterflies that inhabit Hainan Island, they created a sculptural abstraction
of butterfly wings that is enlarged to a fantastic scale that fills the center of
the lobby. It’s created of steel and covered in a specialty reinforced resincoated finish resembling natural plaster “to create a pure, pristine effect
of an abstraction in white,” weighs as much as a 747, and was fabricated
on site in four weeks, with artisans welding around the clock. As Monk

says, “By using the outline and emphasizing the intricacy of the wings and
making the sculpture ‘transparent,’ guests can appreciate the enormity of
the space while also wandering through this central focal point.”

Kumi, Las Vegas > For the Light Group’s

Novotel Times Square, New
York > When the renovation of the Novotel

Times Square is complete later this month,
the hotel will boast a futuristic design layered
with commissioned artwork courtesy of New
York-based Stonehill & Taylor. “Our starting
point was the overall concept of New Year’s
Eve celebrations and new beginnings, which
we thought encapsulated Times Square’s
place in culture,” explains Michael Suomi,
principal and vice president of interior design
at Stonehill & Taylor, who worked with Soho
Myriad on many of the commissioned pieces.

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September 2013 hospitalitydesign.com

“We developed a set of ideas that relate to this
concept, like traditions from around the world,
words, music, and popular sayings. We shared
these ideas with selected artists and asked them
to interpret in order to create their vision of
the New Year.” At the entrance, guests walk
through a “deconstructed” Times Square ball
of color-changing LEDs. An installation at the
buffet station by Thrush Holmes features the
saying “Gleaming New Poems of Distant Nights”
glowing in neon lights. In the restaurant, artist
Todd Alexander created the room’s “wonderfully
mysterious” focal point—a long collage of staged
photographs taken by him that celebrates
various New Year’s traditions, mixed
with painted elements. And throughout
the lobby, columns showcase digital art
by three different artists, coordinated for
different times of the day. A photographer
from Florida used traditional handheld
cameras to create shifting cinematic
segments of traditions around the world;
an interactive videographer transformed
YouTube clips of people jumping into
water into giant pointillism; and the third
piece is a digital animation incorporating
the rotation of clocks and the earth around
the sun.

newest in Mandalay Bay, Kumi Japanese
Restaurant + Bar, designer Alessandro Munge—
one-half of Toronto-based Munge Leung—had
to figure out how to draw patrons into the
rotunda dining space from the casino floor. His
solution: a cherry blossom mural that stretches
145 feet in circumference and 25 feet high. He
sent his in-house graphic director to High Park
(one of Toronto’s green spaces) to photograph
the Sakura trees in bloom; roughly 30 of those

images were edited together to create a digital
composite that was printed on a wallpaper
substrate. “We wanted patrons to feel as though
they are dining in the middle of a blossom forest.
The graphic is slightly distorted, and we then
applied a watercolor effect in order to maintain
an abstract feel that didn’t overwhelm,” explains
Munge, adding that it was printed in 55 separate
sections and then installed. “The mural has a
beautiful, dream-like quality to it that draws the
eye through the space, and helps to pique diners’
interest and curiosity.”
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