Hasta La Ideas

Tucked away across a bridge in the center of Copenhagen, Denmark lies the largest hotel room the city has to offer: the Vipp Loft. You might recognize Vipp‘s name from the classic trashcan design that put them on the map exactly 80 years ago. “My grandfather made the Vipp trashcan for my grandmother’s hairdressing salon 80 years ago, ” recalls Vipp CEO and third generation owner Kasper Egelund. “It was simply an industrial product with a very specific purpose.”

“At a car dealership, you can touch a car, sure. But it’s the moment you drive it and dream it that you know you want to commit.”

But now Vipp is positioning themselves as so much more than a trashcan brand. Over the span of 80 years, they have branched out into designing a full kitchen, living room and dining room seating—even two luxury hotels, Vipp Shelter and Vipp Loft. “When we opened the Vipp Shelter in Sweden, people instantly wanted to stay there and experience it for themselves. We weren’t in the hotel industry, but the interest was huge,” says says Egelund. The Vipp Shelter is a remote home in the forest that allows visitors an impeccably designed experience where they’re able to test Vipp products in a comfortable living situation. “It’s all about giving people the opportunity to take a step into an experience economy where you’re able to test environments and products before committing,” he continued.

After contemplating what it means to “try before you buy”, the Vipp team decided to apply a similar model to the vacant top floor of their office. “We realized we should just take the full step and design a place where people can live instead of a showroom designed for meetings. At a car dealership, you can touch a car, sure. But it’s the moment you drive it and dream it that you know you want to commit.”

Vipp gave designer David Thulstrup (also known for the recent Noma redesign) full reign over designing and decorating the space, and it shows. The result is a massive, two-level space made cozy with thoughtful details, including carefully placed Vipp products, natural wood beams, art pieces from local Copenhagen artists, lush greenery, a custom staircase and heated bathroom tiles. During sunrise and sunset, the massive windows symmetrically placed on both sides of the loft let in just the right angles and amount of natural lighting. And if you seek total darkness, the automatic blind system allows for easy adjustments.

When asked about the careful mix between Vipp’s industrial products and natural materials like wood, Egelund expressed the importance in striking the right balance. “It’s on purpose that the Vipp products are surrounded by more natural products and materials to soften and warm things up,” he says. The experience is all in the textural details and senses, from the smells after cooking in the fully stocked kitchen to the sounds emitted from the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay A9 speaker to the comforting heated bathroom tiles.

Yup, that’s what home should feel like.

No matter how popular Vipp becomes for its wider range of products and sought-after luxury design experiences, though, Egelund and his team will never forget where the company started. “The story of Vipp starts and still continues with a bin my grandfather made for my grandmother. It’s an industrial product that was never originally intended as a product for domestic use, and today, 80 years later, its design is almost exactly the same.”

Try your luck getting a reservation at the Vipp Loft or Vipp Shelter here. And keep an eye out for Vipp’s upcoming third hotel, Chimney House, which will open sometime this year.

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Core77

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Core77

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Core77

Photo credit: Photo Credit: Vipp

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Neri&Hu cofounder Lyndon Neri explains how the studio referenced traditional Chinese courtyard homes in its design for a hotel, in this interview Dezeen filmed at the AHEAD Asia awards ceremony.

Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat won awards in two categories – New Concept of the Year, and Landscaping and Outdoor Spaces – at the third AHEAD Asia awards in March, which celebrated the best in hotel and resort design across the continent.

Located in the Chinese city of Yangzhou, the 20-room hotel comprise a series of old structure that have been renovated and extended. A network of pathways creates a grid that surrounds these buildings and also frames new courtyards.

The hotel is located close to the Slender West Lake in Hanjiang, a popular tourist destination which attracts visitors with its manmade lakes.

“The design brief called for the adaptive reuse of some existing buildings close to a beautiful panoramic lake called the Silver Lake,” Neri said.

In order to connect the existing structures, the Shanghai-based studio looked to a housing typology based around courtyards, typical to the Yangzhou area.

“We had to find a way to tie them together so we looked into the Yangzhou traditional courtyard house typology and overlaid this grid on the entire site with walls and pathways,” Neri told Dezeen. “By doing this we created courtyards.”

Each courtyard on site corresponds to a different facility within a hotel, including the reception area, the dining area and the guest rooms.

The bricks used to build the walkways were sourced from the surrounding area, and they give the site a muted colour palette.

“Most of the reclaimed bricks were from sites nearby,” Neri said. “It gives that patina to the entire project.”

Neri praised the client behind the project and his interest in creating architectural landmarks in lesser known rural areas, such as Yangzhou.

“The client was quite a visionary,” Neri said. “He argues that there’s a lot of potential in places outside major cities. He has acquired remote properties that are historically significant but small.”

“Landmarks in China cannot be limited to just the Great Wall, the Summer Palace or the Forbidden City,” he added.

The project’s focus on using reclaimed materials and its adapted re-use of existing buildings particularly intrigued the architects. Neri said clients are increasingly making sustainability a priority.

“The idea of sustainability is now becoming a paramount issue and I find it very encouraging as a practice that we’re actually given more and more of these projects to allow ourselves to experiment and push the boundaries,” he said.

Neri&Hu also used reclaimed bricks for a chapel in the city of Suzhou, which combines a textured brick base with a white box made from perforated metal.

This movie was produced by Dezeen for AHEAD. It was filmed at Andaz Singapore. Images are courtesy of Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat.

The post Neri&Hu looked to “traditional courtyard house typology” for Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat appeared first on Dezeen.

Koji Kasatani est un artiste japonais spécialisé dans la sculpture. S’inspirant de ce qui l’entoure, de scènes de la vie quotidienne, d’objets fréquemment utilisés, il crée des pièces en céramique impressionnantes. Il reproduit ses oeuvres à partir de déchets, de boîtes en carton, ou encore d’aliments. Il a réalisé une série d’oeuvres constituées de bananes, dans un état de décomposition plus ou moins avancé, leur donnant des formes humanoïdes ou animales, créant également des bustes avec le fruit entier ou uniquement avec leurs peaux. Drôles et inédites, ses réalisations sont visibles sur sa page Instagram, pour le bonheur des yeux.

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