Shanghai's studio FOUR O NINE, winner of the Eurostars Hotel Lab award

The FOUR O NINE studio in Shanghai was last year’s winner of the Eurostars Hotel Lab, the first hotel innovation and design competition, which was launched at the beginning of last year by Eurostars Hotels. Its project Play & Display, which implies a new system of distribution in which the whole hotel room revolves around the bed, will get an economical amount of 8.000 euros.

The Chinese studio has turned the bed into the main item of the room, which will be surrounded by all the activities which revolve around the guest and which they can do during its stay. The judges have highlighted the originality of the project, which avoids the usual distribution consisting of the different spaces of the room (such as the work space, the desk, the bed, etc.) to integrate them in the central part of the room and add some complementary furniture. The only spaces in the room excluded from this kind of distribution are the bathroom and the luggage area.

Eurostars Hotel Lab is the first hotel designing contest launched by a Spanish hotel chain, the Hotusa Group. Which, according to the company sources, “reinforces the permanent bet to innovate of the Hotusa Group”. In its first call, the company received 135 projects coming from countries such as Spain, Italy, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Israel, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Perú, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Poland.

In this first edition, the participants had to submit the design of a room equipped with a set of furniture consisting of a twin bed with a headboard, a closet, a luggage carrier and a working space, having the freedom to add every extra they considered that needed to be added as well as redistributing the available space in the room

The group of judges was made up of professionals that are experts in the interior design world was the one in charge of choosing the winning projects taking into account the innovation criteria, by means of new materials and solutions; the functionality of the designed elements and the originality, meaning that the elements used in those submissions couldn’t have been used in previous projects.

Source: La Vanguardia