Bye-Bye, Mother Mundane...

I once asked a famous architect, "What is your biggest challenge when sketching out a new hotel project?" She replied, "Owner's confidence." 

Swimming against the tide of the cookie-cutter hotel template requires a certain boldness; it is potentially a gamble, but it can also give the new place a legacy, a standout formula that was creatively inspired by a view, a fragment of a building, a loose idea grounded on the ski slopes, or a brain-wave sketch on a bar napkin. Just returning from travels again, I am pleasingly warmed by creative differences and thoughtful interventions that make a place a standalone, unique. "Bravo," I say to all those hoteliers, owners, designers, and creative amigos who went against the flow, trusting their instincts; after all, it is not only the architects and designers who come up with that lightbulb moment – I have a whole book filled with them for that one-day-soon project 🤓. 

Like a fantastic little novel of creative encounters, this Sunday's Edit features those architects of hotel outposts on the serious design map. If you love original thought and the creative brilliance of hotel architecture and beyond, this is your hymn book of engineered beauty, aesthetics and a fostered relationship to local materials and crafts. 

It's tough to select just a dirty dozen of designers from THE AFICIONADOS community, but these twelve hum to the style tunes of bold structure and disciplined form; this is my little edit of centrefold architectural porn and the hotels that sing with structural panache. 

The Twelve Apostles of Hotel Architecture - why travel with Mother Mundane when you've got us?

Hugs

Iain & Co.