hospitalitystyle.com

(December 2011) posted on Wed Dec 14, 2011 EST

Luxury lifestyle hotel to debut on Valentine’s Day

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W Hotels Worldwide will mark its debut in France on February 14, 2012, with the new W Paris-Opéra hotel. Owned by Barcelona-based Meridia Capital, the 91-key luxury lifestyle hotel is housed inside an 1870s Haussman-era heritage building. The hotel has been designed jointly by W Global Brand Design and Rockwell Group Europe (RGe).

“Through the opening of W Paris-Opéra, fashionistas and global jetsetters can now be on the runway with W from New York to London and Paris,” says Eva Ziegler, Global Brand Leader, W Hotels Worldwide and Le Méridien, a unit of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. “Unique lifestyle programming within a cutting-edge designed environment will bring a new and distinctive experience to Paris and the Parisians alike.”

Diego Gronda, RGe’s managing and creative director, says the overall design objective for the hotel was “to provide guests with an unforgettable experience of the light and sophistication present all over this amazing city. Our design feeds off the elegance, richness and radiance of Paris, ‘La Ville Lumière.’ while layering in the contemporary cool and free-spirited energy of New York. Our goal is to transform this historic building into a W Hotel that literally shines with innovative and unexpected details, materials and technology.”

The centerpiece of that effort is an oversized backlit digital undulating wall that defines the central core of the building and weaves through the public and private spaces. A “spark” will appear as a dotted pattern that forms abstract clouds, and the wall will be set at various tempos to create different moods to match the season, event, time of day, and location within the hotel. The elevators, DJ booth and staircases will be cloaked in red, to give the illusion of being inside an epicenter of energy.

Historic features of the 19th-century building, such as ornamented columns, vaulted ceilings, marble staircases and fireplaces, have been partially restored and are often juxtaposed against contemporary elements. The building’s original stained-glass windows and mosaic flooring on the second floor have been retained.