Art Hotels

What repeats here is the shell and nothing else. The house keeps its old floor heights, its stair, its window rhythm and its corridor, and every room opens off that corridor in the ordinary way. Services run where the building already had them, so plumbing and doors sit in familiar positions.

The rooms themselves never repeat. Each was given to a different artist to make, and a guest books a particular one rather than a category. Paint, objects, furniture and sometimes the ceiling belong to that room alone, and moving next door means entering work by another person entirely.

The house was let to artists to work on when the district around it was still changing, and the results were kept. That history explains why the plan is conventional while the rooms are not: only the surfaces were ever open to change.

Sleeping units are lengths of concrete drainage pipe, cast for civil works and used unchanged. Each has the same wall thickness, the same round section, the same door cut into one end and the same bed fitted inside. Set them side by side and the difference between them is their position.

The park is the part that exists once. Washing places, food and everything else belong to Ottensheim and to the riverside path rather than to the hotel, so the ground each pipe stands on is doing the work that a building would normally do.

The pipes were chosen because they were already made, already weatherproof and already the right width for a bed. Using a standard product meant the rooms could be placed in a public park without putting up a building at all.

Cells were kept as they were built, and each has the same narrow window in the same place, the same wall thickness and the same door position on the corridor. Rooms were made by joining cells together, so the seam between two of them shows up again and again along a floor.

The wall around the site stands once, and so does the vaulted corridor that runs the length of the block with galleries above it. The peninsula itself is single: brick warehouses, a ferry berth and water at the end of most streets in Katajanokka.

A prison plan is a repeated cell by definition, and the building was listed, so the cells could not simply be swept away. Converting it meant working inside the old openings and accepting the rhythm the nineteenth century left.

Only the container repeats: the hall floor, the roof over it and the circulation between the structures. Everything a guest walks on and past belongs to the building rather than to a room, and it holds the different pieces in one volume without imposing a plan on them.

The structures inside never repeat. One is a tram carriage, another a wooden staircase, another a hidden room behind a bookcase, and each was built as a separate piece of work. Booking means choosing an object, not a room type, because there is no second version of any of them.

The idea was to make staying feel like walking into a set of built pieces rather than a corridor of doors. A large open volume made that possible, since each structure could be assembled on the floor without touching its neighbours.

The frame repeats and stays quiet. Rooms are white, laid out to the same plan, with the bed, the window and the bathroom door in the same relation to one another. That sameness is deliberate, because it leaves one surface free and makes the eye go straight to it.

The painted wall never repeats. Each was made by a different young artist from a different school, working directly on the plaster, and the result stays with that room. A guest who changes rooms on a second visit is looking at a different hand and a different subject.

The house was rebuilt as a plain modern hotel and then handed room by room to art students, which is why the plan is standard and the wall is not. The white envelope came first and the painting was applied to it.

Openings in the old stone wall run at one width and one spacing, and the guest rooms were placed behind them so that each takes an opening as its window. Inside, the same dark stone, the same recovered brick and the same glass detail return from room to room along the wall.

The courtyard and the long pool cut into it exist once, held between the old walls with the sky open above. The nineteenth-century structure that survives around them is single too: masonry from a purification works, kept standing and left visible rather than rebuilt.

The industrial building set the rhythm before anyone thought about rooms. Its wall was structural and listed in effect, so the new work went behind it, and the repeated opening became the way every room meets the outside.