Hotel Savoy - Buenos Aires Old World Traditional Style with Some Twists

Irwin Weiner ASID - We can learn a lot about residential interior design from international hotels. We're covering the hotel beat this week on Design2Share because with summertime here, we're all planning destination vacation getaways. So why not stay at somewhere stylish. Who knows? You may come home with decorating, gardening, and color combination inspiration from your hotel stay that you'd like to experiment with in your own space. And that means indoor or outdoor space, too; we learned a lot about beautiful garden planning from staying once at the Four Seasons Istanbul. In today's featured video, you'll find an older building in Buenos Aires providing good bones for a contemporary, yet still very traditional boutique hotel makeover at the Hotel Savoy.

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Click here to make sure your next destination vacation is a style-conscious design trip (among other things!); discover Wallpaper* City Guides.

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Art Gone Wild in Marseille Hotel Suites

Irwin Weiner ASID - I've often said that artwork makes a room special - but the Hotel Au Vieux Panier in Marseille, France turned over their room decor to top artists who produced unique creations and turned "hotel style" on its head. Design2Share readers have often heard me criticize high-end luxury hotels for promoting a bland, homogenized look that's seeped into residential interior design.

When I tell a client that their house looks like a hotel, she will be pleased at first, until I tell her that it all looks like they're staging the home for resale (read: your house is devoid of charm and personality). Well, this French hotel takes the stuffings right out of my hotel style beef. Each room is loaded with intensity and artistic angst. You wouldn't want to live day in and day out in these rooms, but you'd certainly love a short stay in this homage to artistic expression.

Enjoy today's featured video on the making of the Panic Room, a graffiti-covered jewel by Talousse-based artist Tilt.

Bonus

Click here to watch videos and read our decorating essay on Art Matters.

And click here to watch the video on New York's "Naked Hotel" Boasts Addictive Video Screen Elevator.

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Elastic Living Luxury Apartment Rentals - Is It for You?

Irwin Weiner ASID - There's a groundswell of enthusiasm for "elastic living." By that we mean apartment, condo, and hotel-like buildings that offer short-term or longer-term accommodations, fully furnished, with complete-package amenities (maid service, room service, gym, pool, concierge).

Your small or large suites are bigger than what you'd find at a hotel, they're decorated as they would be for a luxury apartment or house (albeit "staged" and missing that interior design stamp of the owner's personality), and they have generous kitchens. The result: you're living in a luxury condo that mimics an intimate boutique hotel.

Corporations and individuals who travel and work a lot find elastic living properties to be the height of convenience; think an actor working for several months on location shooting a movie or TV show on location away from home or a busy executive who has an extended project away from her home office. AKA Luxury Furnished Suites is one such provider in multiple cities (e.g., Beverly Hills, NYC, Philadelphia), and the view of a terrace in their Central Park location (see top photo) shows the allure and fantasy of a fully-furnished luxe accommodation, which they cleverly refer to as a "Pied-À-Terre On Demand."

The following video interviews people who live in these elastic living rentals - and don't you think they would be ideal situations for families who are decorating their homes and have to move out for a period of time while their demolition, renovation, and interior design projects are in full swing?

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Click here for What's Wrong with a Hotel Look for My Home?

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World's Wildest Hotel Concepts Ever!

Irwin Weiner ASID - I call wild architecture "that Dubai phenomenon." It seems that this Middle Eastern philosophy of More Is More is catching on, and there are some amazing, futuristic concepts afoot for new hotels on land, in the ocean, in outer space, and - attention, Newt Gingrich - on the moon. Today's featured video will show you some of these wild hotel concepts, including The Waterworld in China (see above), an imaginative vision for a new hotel in a former quarry. 

But not all wild hotel concepts involve Dubai-style excessive architecture. Some hotels have concepts that are imaginative without being over the top, like Das Park Hotel in Austria (see photos above), where you can stay in a hotel room made from concrete pipes. In a similar recycling bent, how about staying at the Capsule Hotel in The Hague (below), where your floating hotel room is inside a bright orange survival pod?

Or how about the Hotel Everland, a single-room luxury hotel suite that is completely mobile - it's moved around from city to city, sometimes winding up on a beautiful lakefront, and other times winding on the roof of a building overlooking the Eiffel Tower in Paris or perched atop a contemporary art gallery in Leipzig?

So now that your concept of real hotels has been exploded, it won't be too much of a stretch to watch the following video and imagine staying in an undersea or outer space hotel, right?

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