New Hotel

by Campana Brothers in collaboration with design students

Athens

A student-designed hotel? No, thanks. That’s how you end up with lava lamps for night lights and a shower where your bed’s supposed to be. But a hotel designed by students and the Campana Brothers: That’s the stuff.

Opened in July, the New Hotel is a renovation of the old Olympic Palace Hotel in Athens, hard by the Acropolis and the Roman ruins of Plaka. Technically, the Campana Brothers did the brunt of the design work, and it shows: Their super-funsies, idiosyncratic style seeps into every wall made out of wooden furniture scraps, every sink in the shape of a faceted rock, and every leather chair that looks like a head of lettuce. The place feels like a fairy tale dreamed up on a cloud of peyote.

Fittingly, the design concept lasers in on three traditional Greek themes, two of which take their cues from classical mythology: a mischievous folkloric shadow puppet called Karagiozis, and the evil eye (a superstition that originated in Greece).

Here's where the younguns come into play. Twenty undergrad architecture students from the University of Thessaly provided the Campana Brothers with “insight into local culture” that the Brazilian pair then incorporated into the design. So if you’re ever staying at the hotel and see a bunch of evil eyeballs strung along the wall, glaring at you penetratingly in bed, now you know why.

via Fast.co

New Hotel by Campana Brothers

New Hotel by Campana Brothers