Designs on Hospitality
Matt Charlton chats to 25hours Hotels founder, Christoph Hoffmann about the importance of design when bringing hotels to life.
“It’s about purposeful rooms, it's about storytelling”
Christoph Hoffmann
Christoph Hoffmann doesn’t have a hotel in the Alps… not yet. On a gloomy day in the UK, I am facetiming one of the founders of 25hours on what looks like an enviously luminous day in the Swiss mountains, as he sits on the balcony of his cabin, overlooking the snow-covered slopes. As he flips the camera to show me the view, I see that he is only wearing socks on his feet. “It's not that cold,” he says, literally surrounded by snow. “It’s actually pretty warm, and I'm off to ski, so these are my ski socks, but it's okay – they're insulated… it's okay,” he repeats, reassuring himself more than me.
Maybe it’s this kind of audacity – scaled up from lack of footwear against the freezing cold, to opening hotels with bold design ideals – which has got him to where he is (both literally and figuratively). But we’re not really here to discuss his entrepreneurial success, although this is, as it turns out, very much intertwined into the matter in-hand: hotel design.
There has certainly been a sea change in what guests expect from their accommodation – no longer do we necessarily agree with Conrad Hilton’s dream - the copying and pasting of a brand aesthetic (it was supposed to be comforting for American tourists) onto any location; we demand something that speaks of the place, and, most importantly of all, looks great on the ‘Gram. “All those typical design hotels, they're naked, they're white. They're unfunctional, dysfunctional, sometimes,” he tells me. “That's the cliche, of course, you have wonderful ones, but some of them, really thought, ‘If I make a hotel white [then] it's cool and it's designed.”
He tells me it’s common sense to make a hotel beautiful and find a good designer, but then he moves on to what seems to be his key belief – concept. “It's about purposeful rooms, it's about storytelling. It's about so many things which differentiate a hotel from being purely designed,” he enthuses. “…and the best examples are legendary grand hotels of this world, or take the Algonquin [inexorably entwined with the Gilded Age], or the Hotel Chelsea in New York”. The Hotel Chelsea, now, of course, an expensive boutique hotel in Manhattan, is riddled with cultural history – a legendary halfway house/incubator for the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Patti Smith. “These hotels are naturally born, and evolved based upon their guests, based upon the stories which happened at that place, based upon tragedies, love, and everything.”
Storytelling was very much a factor in his first hotel, 25hours Hotel Frankfurt, which turns 20 this year, and it came from one of Christoph’s co-founders, Ardi Goldman. “Ardi is a real estate developer based in Frankfurt, and he owned this building that I already knew because we tried to develop it in earlier stages. Ardi is a very challenging, very creative, visionary person… a bit crazy as well, which always helps. He’d never done a hotel before, but he saw the opportunity – a hotel in which each and every room had its own story,” Christoph tells me, briefly turning the screen off so he can put on some shoes – his feet are getting cold. “So Ardi said, ‘I want to collect my friends, my neighbours, and I will interview them, and we go from the princess all the way to the beggar, and each of them has one room that is totally designed after the story of that person.’ We had 49 rooms only, but still it was quite challenging.”
In terms of early collaborators, “We had one sculptor and one lady who was a painter, if I remember correctly. They didn't have a lot of experience in design, but they were, of course, very passionate about being able to do a hotel. We started to understand how important it is to not only go crazy, but to give the rooms a certain functionality, and concept. It was kind of a testing ground, and luckily when we opened it, it worked immediately.”
This success then allowed them to open a second property in Frankfurt – at the time in collaboration with Levi Jeans, whose Germany HQ was next door. As the properties became bigger and more ambitious however, how challenging was it to retain control of the concept, and the character, of the brand? “It's not about telling Werner (Aisslinger, architect of 25hours Berlin) or Paula (Navone, 25hours Florence) or Alfredo (Häberli, 25hours Zurich West) ‘This is the lobby, make it nice. Design it in a nice way,’ and then goodbye and I come back when they’re done,” he tells me. “It's important to have a conversation, and that natural conflict between what the hotel should be about and what the hotel has to look like. Therefore, I think it's really, really important to have those parties being involved, having a challenging relationship, fighting and having… you know… good talks.”
Can he recall any of his most memorable ‘good talks’? “We came up with the idea of diving deeper into the story of Dante’s Divine Comedy for Florence. We wanted to find stories out of the book that were a bit more hidden and translate them into the hotel, and we more or less decided this before we engaged architect and interior designer Paula Navone [on the project]. Now, she’s Italian, and she was very blunt, saying ‘Christoph, you're, you're crazy. I mean, how can you Germans even touch the story of Dante? That's sacrilege’.”
Anyone who’s ever tried to add cream to a carbonara can imagine the indignance. “But then we talked and we said, come on, let's give it a try. Let's make it different. Let's have a twinkle in the eye and be a bit ironic about the storytelling as well. Florence is quite possibly 25hours Hotels at its most playful and audacious – accommodation that is either in heaven or hell, now updated to 'Bianco' or 'Rosso'; chandeliers made from runes, shared spaces representing limbo, and an elevator that opens revealing a neon sign reading ‘hell’.
Bikini Berlin comes a close second however – its ‘Urban Jungle’ design incorporating plants, hammocks, monkeys, an elevator with an animated story of the area’s history, and even reception tiles evoking Alexanderplatz U-Bahn. “We needed to get acquainted again with the western part of Berlin, and the coolness of the area before the reunification. We had the tier garden in front of us in the zoo, and that really rough city on the other side. And I think that we came up pretty quickly with this contradiction of telling this story of urban jungle.” However, in an inevitable clash between the dreamer and the architect, they had to convince Werner Aisslinger to buy into their storytelling ideal.
“Werner was also a type of person who really never cared so much about storytelling. So we had to force him a little bit to do so.” Its recent refurbishment has just been an extension of the story, with a touch of learned business acumen baked in, as the city and the needs of the guest change. “I believe it's important to also use a design style that you can extend over the course of time. You need to make sure that the hotel in 20 years is still a cool place,” he adds.
The elapsing of time is all part of the storytelling that Christoph prizes so much. Placing such importance on the story, and treating the property almost as one the characters, factors in the kind of evolution which translates into enduring appeal. But what’s next in his story? “I have Bikini, the company which I founded with my old shareholding partners. We have two really nice properties in Mallorca, and you see a lot of 25hours influence there as we used one of our favourite designers. With 25hours, we just signed off on another city. Each new property reinvents our brand a little bit. I hope I can contribute so the brand will still be strong, cool and sexy.” Sounds like a design concept we can all get behind.
