Upcoming projects: Hotel The Exchange
By Jennifer M. Volland | October 25, 2011
Behind every remarkable hotel, there is an equally remarkable person. César Ritz. Richard D’Oyly Carte. Conrad Hilton. Ian Schrager. André Balazs. They all made names for themselves by introducing new ideas to the field of hospitality. At Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy in Amsterdam, this person is Suzanne Oxenaar. Her name may not be bandied about in the press to the same degree as the male-dominant group listed above but she’s definitely one to watch.
- Hotel The Exchange, Amsterdam, 2011, source: Hotel The Exchange
Oxenaar’s success can be traced to her interdisciplinary approach to projects. In the early 1990s, she co-founded Supperclub, which started as a restaurant without a location. Once it found a permanent home, Supperclub became a place where people ate multi-course meals in bed while enjoying a mix of art, music, dance, theater and fashion (Oxenaar is no longer involved; today Supperclub is a huge commercial enterprise that lacks the avant-garde, spontaneous quality it once had). To see just how adept she and her initiators were at capturing the cultural zeitgeist, check out this YouTube video created by Supperclub’s former chef:
By the mid-1990s, Oxenaar participated in the critical debate about the international position of Amsterdam within the field of art. She, along with partner Otto Nan, hatched the idea to open a hotel that showcased Dutch design and catered to cultural visitors. Eight year later, in 2004, Lloyd opened its doors in the newly rejuvenated Eastern Docklands area. Interestingly, Oxenaar sees Lloyd less as a hotel and more as a place to connect likeminded people. Yet she values the hotel setting as a place of experimentation, not only at Lloyd, but also at her other projects like Llove and her and Nan’s latest venture, The Exchange.
Labaratory, Hotel The Exchange, Amsterdam, 2011, source: Hotel The Exchange
Impression, Hotel The Exchange, Amsterdam, 2011, source: Hotel The Exchange
Opening December 3, 2011, The Exchange bills itself as “The Hotel with Rooms Dressed like Models”. Students and alumni of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute are performing the “dressing,” and essentially the hotel rooms have served as their studios for the past year. In conjunction with the Textielmuseum, the designers have developed new fabrics, and the design studio Ina-Matt—responsible for styling the hotel, Stock (the restaurant, which will serve breakfast all day) and Options! (the department store, which will carry fashion and other products from Holland and around the world)—has created two new tiles for the interior. Similar to Lloyd, the 61 rooms will range from 1 to 5 stars.
Roos Soetekouw 5 - Misunderstood creatures, Hotel The Exchange, Amsterdam, 2011
The invocation of the body also has to do with location. The Exchange occupies three buildings that face the H.P. Berlage-designed Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the Damrak. This area, near the Red Light District, is part of an urban renewal initiative to inject fashion, culture and diversity into a part of town that previously had a singular, overriding association.
This type of disciplinary conflation is where Oxenaar shines. She’s able to weave together seemingly disparate forces into a powerful mise-en-scène. At the same time, her projects feel organic and unforced, an exploratory journey that you sense she had as much fun creating as we will have visiting. So while fashion-inspired hotels are nothing new—Hotel Missoni in Edinburgh, the Maison Moschino in Milan and the Armani Hotel in Dubai come to mind—something tells me the experience of the Exchange will be totally original.
Part of a series on future hotels that have caught our interest.
