IBIS STYLES ROMA AURELIA, the entire spectrum of colors in one place

The project involves the total renovation of a hotel built in the early 1980s to create a four-star hotel for the Ibis Styles chain. The challenge of the project, within an extremely restricted budget, was to reopen all the public spaces of the lobby, the hall, the coffee bar and the restaurant to create an open, fluid, bright and colored urban like space on the ground floor, characterized by interconnected, informal, and stimulating environments, and to break the monotony of the almost three hundred identical rooms distributed on the five upper levels within the use of color. The pre-existing structure was a narrow and long six storey high building detached and isolated from the surrounding buildings and oriented towards the sun like a self-sufficient transatlantic with all the rooms facing the two long fronts distributed by a central corridor. Over time the interiors had undergone changes, extensions and superfetations with the result of closing and separating the spaces in traditional functional areas, such as the restaurant room, the breakfast room, and the hall each one closed within confined spaces accessible through corridors and doors. The exteriors have been redesigned in black and white to accentuate the appearance and feeling of a naval structure, transforming the large building into a pure white prism on which the sunlight beats, breaking down into the colors of the iris while penetrating inside. The interior of the lobby on the ground floor has been unified into a whole open and interconnected stripped of every partition and plaster leaving everything exposed such as reinforced concrete pillars and beams, concrete ceilings, a new polished concrete in cast floor, installations descendants enclosed in iron sheet tubes, and horizontal ducts and air machines in sight. The new spaces left completely open and undivided are redefined by large concrete benches cast in place in the hall, in the cafeteria and in the restaurant positioned on the border under the windows or in the middle of the space such as the one in the coffee bar. Finally, the entire spectrum of colors of sunlight from sunrise to sunset is used to make it warmer the neutral and raw space. Some colored walls act as a backdrop to the spaces of the bar, the restaurant and the hall, identifying the focal points of the reception, the patisserie and the restaurant. A carpet reproducing the gradient colors of the iris is repeated over all the six levels floors, and the walls of the rooms take up the color corresponding to the position of the color on the carpet in the corridor which therefore functions as an orientation key to identify the position of the rooms. A room with blue walls will correspond to the same color in the corridor, ideally the numbering of the rooms may be superfluous and the color of the corridor floor may be sufficient to find your room. In the evening, the colors of the walls of the rooms are reflected outside, coloring the facades. The hall space is conceived as an informal and dynamic bright open space in which it is possible to move as in an urban environment without separations or spaces interluded with seats of different types, high and low where you can sit indifferently to watch the movement of people, take a coffee at the self-service counter, working with a pc, having small meetings or meeting. The bar and the pizzeria restaurant overlook the path with armchairs and tables of different sizes as on the streets of Rome. The reception is also designed as a long table where it is possible to sit around for an informal welcome and without the barriers of the traditional desk. Some special rooms add elements of surprise and disorientation within the succession of standard rooms. In the China rooms, a counter-wall with a circular opening in front of the glass wall separates a space inside the room to isolate oneself to read or become a fantastic play space for a child. The fire-place rooms contain a large fireplace over the entire width of the room under the windows, adding an unexpected element of comfort. Finally, the pool rooms are designed as an indoor real pool inspired by the work of the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich.