TwoThree Hotel / Design in Motion

Curated by Clara Ott

Architects: Design in Motion
Area: 2400 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs:Soopakorn Srisakul
Manufacturers: AGC, Alumet, Lysaght, Nippon, Tekethik
Interior Designer: Design in Motion
Landscape Designer: Design in Motion
Engineering: Kor-it Structural Analysis and Design Co., Ltd.
Contractor: Square Arch Construction Co.Ltd

‘TwoThreeHotel’ is a 7-storey hotel project on Sukhumvit 23 road, one of the prime areas in central business district of Bangkok, Thailand. This is the refurbishment of the old apartment building in which the owner required to turn it into a new city hotel. The refreshed building consists of 68 guest rooms, a restaurant and a swimming pool.

The major problem of each room in the existing apartment was its small dimension, and its insufficient size of window. To improve those uncomfortable spaces, we decide to integrate the existing terrace to be a part of each room, as well as expand the size of its window. As a result, these provide larger, brighter and more functional rooms and, by this design, the exterior terrace has been turned into the indoor space acting as a relaxing daybed corner.

However, the other limitation is that those new daybed corners’ refreshed walls facing directly the neighbours’ lands have to be constructed as solid walls. This is because the spaces between each former terrace and the adjacent lands are too close to directly provide openings due to the building setback regulation in Bangkok. In other words, windows are allowed merely on their profile walls. Therefore, to reflect our design aim of natural light, recessed windows are designed to generate more indirect light for the daybed corners and interior spaces.

As the design solutions with those interior daybeds, we have decided to reflect them to the exterior façade and express them to be the main language of the building with wooden texture, while the overall design comprises of simple geometry forms and the main material is plastered and white painted wall. Consequently, this clean white wall with the touch of some wooden material could make this hotel cozier and more comfortable to the guests.

In the aspect of landscape design, because of the constraint of the land’s area, where no space is left to plant large trees, the vertical and potted garden is selected to be the solution of the landscape design, determining to generate the outdoor atmosphere more greenery.Simultaneously, the character of this design is inspired by small gardens on the houses’ backyards, where various shapes of terrazzo pots are generally arranged to create small corners with friendly environment and the guests could feel at their home by this landscaping.