Atellior’s hospitality project Park Plaza Utrecht inspired by De Stijl movement and the city of Utrecht.
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Atellior was appointed for refurbishment of the Park Plaza Utrecht in 2017; the year of foundation of De Stijl. This was a particularly special year for the city of Utrecht. Founders of De Stijl, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg expressed the utopic ideals of soulful harmony and order through total abstraction and universal design, achieved with the use of basic forms and colours. Visual compositions were reduced to purely horizontal and vertical; minimal and without crossing over a meeting of planes in the vast majority of works, whilst incorporating the primary colour palette of red, blue, yellow along with black and white.
The clients’ aim was to do a reconstruction in phases so the hotel would remain open throughout the entire process, and by the end, a newly equipped hotel was to be presented with a new story to accompany it. Having recognised that the main clientele of this particular Park Plaza hotel were working professionals; the client wished to bring as much ease as possible to the often draining experience of a business trip, through the creation of spaces that create a relaxing form of working from one’s own home.
In terms of the overall spatial configuration, the ground floor features the reception with a lobby and bar, the restaurant with a separate private dining area, gym and restrooms. In line with today’s trends of hotel spatial planning, the lobby area, with no visual barriers, flows into the bar area, and then to the restaurant, encouraging guests to use more of the facilities the hotel has to offer. In addition to this, 120 rooms are spread across first to sixth floor of the hotel.
The rooms are different by the type of bed (Double and Twin beds) but otherwise have identical floor plans. The seventh floor hold conference facilities with the main hall able to be split into 3 smaller spaces. This floor has seven more meeting rooms with a lobby tying all the conference spaces together. The inspiration behind the selected colour scheme used in floors one to seven was, "Simultaneous Composition XXIV" by Theo van Doesburg.
Awareness of the hotel’s context and the translation of this information into a space allowed the hotel to tell a story about its unique locality and ultimately what it has to offer. Construction was successfully completed at the end of 2019, in time for the busy Christmas period.