Project: Alex Hotel
Interior Design: Arent & Pyke
Architect: Space Agency
Location: Perth, Australia
Photography: Anson Smart
AWARDS
Winner 2016 Australian Interior Design Awards AIDA Hospitality
Winner 2016 Belle Coco Republic Interior Design Awards Hospitality
Winner 2016 Dulux Colour Awards Hospitality
Shortlist 2016 Interior Design Excellence Awards IDEA Hospitality
Sydney-based Arent & Pyke has recently completed the interiors of the new boutique hotel in Perth, Alex Hotel.
Located within the cosmopolitan and developing cultural landscape of Northbridge in Perth is the Alex Hotel; a joyous collaboration between Perth-based architects Spaceagency, Arent&Pyke, and the hotel’s passionate founders. “Sarah-Jane Pyke and Juliette Arent were tasked with creating a homely, welcoming, timeless and individual ambience for guests. Years later and their design scheme continues to play a fundamental role in making our guests feel at immediately at home, in comfortable and familiar surroundings.” Alex Hotel founders
The owners recognised from the outset that unless the interior design of the Alex Hotel was domestic in scale and aesthetic, the project would feel like just another small hotel regardless of how much effort the hosts made. After initial meetings with commercial interior design consultants did not result in proposals that met the brief, the owners approached Arent & Pyke to take on the project. Arent & Pyke were tasked with creating an ambience for guests that was homely, welcoming, timeless and individual.
Developing a softened, refined aesthetic scheme, Arent&Pyke’s furnishing specification and interior styling spoke to the imagined personality of Alex, the character behind the eponymous hotel. Travelled, lively and meditative, Alex has become a much-visited and much-loved identity of Perth’s cityscape. “We wanted to reflect the richness of Alex’s personality,” the designers continue, “forming our interior vision around four essential pillars: the personal, the escape, the craft and the legacy. The Alex hotel wants to nurture, and we created that through championing its sense of intimacy and domesticity.”
Alex Hotel responds to the overarching concept of the ‘Hotel as Home’. Together with the client, four key concepts were established for the interior design; ‘the personal’, ‘the escape’, ‘the craft’ and ‘the legacy’, to nurture a sense of intimacy, connectedness and domesticity.
With the client, there was always a discussion about ‘Alex’ being someone familiar to us all; an uncle whose home you love to visit, a treasured old friend with a house full of wonderment. The interior design, furnishing and styling imagines the richness, the personality, a sense of frivolity and the layering of a story.
