HOTEL STONE 9 pays attention to interaction and entertainment, the primary target is the young tourist born in 1990s and 2000s. Compared with other hotels, we hope Stone 9 could provide a better condition for communications and could be a lively and vivacious gathering place for young people. We also hope the guests feel some local culture during the staying period, so that to give them a profound impression of Chongqing.
In the original site plan, rooms connected by a closed, narrow corridor, and there is not any public area to use, that is definitely not the space form we were expecting. In order to create a more interesting hotel, we downsize the space of hotel rooms, that makes the narrow corridor to be more capacious and versatile. The hotel has a lobby bar center, and many other lounges distributing in every parts, so that the hotel’s public area looks more like a café shop or leisure club, hoping the guests would like to come out from the private room to spend time freely in the public area.
We imagine the public area as street, so it is possible to open the room windows towards the public area, which in one hand solves the problem of the 2nd floor’s insufficient illumination caused by the existing structure, in another hand that is optimistic to increase the interaction between room and public. We also build the 2nd floor corridors as open spaces, to make the spaces more interesting and connectable.
The height of the hotel site is only 4.8m, and it must contain 2 floors for independent rooms, including their necessary pipeline system. In such a low altitude space, it is impossible to just simply set a unified height as the 2nd level. In order to guarantee both 1st and 2nd level have reasonable and comfortable space, it is important to analyze the suitable altitudes for each activity in the room and make the 1st and 2nd floor layout accordingly. For example, we give the space under the bed at 2nd floor to the 1st floor to increase it’s ceiling height. At the same time, we can find some area in 1st floor which does not require too much height such as bathroom and bed, so that we could make it´s ceiling lower to give the 2nd floor more space. With the different and plenty level height in the same room, the guests are hard to notice the shortage of the low site height during the stay period.
We hope the hotel can make use of the natural illumination maximally. So we reduce the possible partitions and use white color to bring in and reflect the natural light. Additionally, some of the room doors are changed to be translucent, to brighten the existing dark corridors through the natural lights.
