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ontinuing with our focus on W Hotels, BD sought out the design team chosen for a highly-coveted and decidedly poignant property─the new W-Downtown New York─57 floors rising above the southern edge of the World Trade Center's memorial site. Christoph Korner, senior associate at Graft, discusses the power of W's brand, the "punk minimalism" of Graft's new design and the importance of mutable identities.
What was W’s vision for the W New York-Downtown when they approached your firm?
It was the vision of W to create a new, high profile flagship for one of its major markets – the Financial Centre of New York City and the World. The major challenge was the intense programmatic mixture of hotel, residences and public areas. All parts have to be strong enough individuals to become lasting expressions of the users’ dreams and wishes, but at the same time share a defined identity, in order to create the feeling of a community.
It was important to invent a theme that would be able to allow maximum freedom for the individual elements, but at the same time create a common identity.
Why do you think W decided to enlist Graft as the firm for the interior work?
This question would of course best be answered by the W itself— we can only speculate. We believe that we were able to bring a lot of experience combined with the necessary freshness to the project. They were looking for a young team that could create a unique experience for this high-profile project and were very interested in our concept of ‘grafting’.
Now that you have worked closely with W, to what do you attribute their growing success during these trying times?
The W was able to create a strong and recognizable brand, without the pure repetition of designs. It is really remarkable how a W hotel can be recognized as part of the group, no matter where it is located, while at the same time always adding uniqueness to each project, tying it in with the location. We think that no other group has been able to achieve that.
How did you incorporate the brand’s style while also satisfying the particular geographical location, i.e. downtown NYC, right by Ground Zero?
We were inspired to create classic modernism with a twist. The understatement and persuasive simplicity of the classics, combined with a new and fresh look at the ideas of comfort and luxury in its most contemporary and even futuristic sense. It can best be described as Punk Minimalism.
W stands for a comfortable modernism, trying to infuse richness into the abstraction and minimalism of the contemporary world through the use of natural and organic, haptic surfaces. The challenge was to create a new and fresh interpretation of the established W language – being the crazy genius in the family. We extensively researched W projects from around the world, in order to understand the framework to work in and at the same time the boundaries we needed to cross, in order to create the flagship for the next generation of W.
The continuing theme of the new W Downtown New York is “the Reveal” —the idea to hide surprises of luxury and beauty within a sophisticated environment. The residents and guests take on the role of the adventurer that discovers secrets at every step. The complexity of the design challenges the users to constantly look for new surprises. They become voyeurs, looking to get a glimpse of internal and external hidden treasures. In order to keep up the sense of surprise and discovery each space had to be designed uniquely. Every area received its own individual treatment within the given boundaries of the theme. For example, over 30 different bathrooms have been designed throughout the building. Each unit received different spatial flow and configuration to keep the mind of the explorer active and occupied at all times. Overall the feeling of surprise and discovery was achieved. Luxury reveals itself in a subtle environment of comfort. Familiar elements and materials get infused with the richness of colors and materials at surprising moments.
What materials were you drawn to use and why?
Public Spaces
The public areas are dominated by a mixture of natural and organic materials (wood mosaic tiles, structured leathers) and highly reflective materials. The organic materials give a feeling of comfort, while the polished surfaces expend the space beyond its physical boundaries. The details of the wood grains and leather surfaces get loaded with a sense of luxury and depth through the reflections in the surfaces.
Apartments
The materials in the apartments are playing with the themes of light, scale and the revelation of secrets. All surfaces are brought to a human scale through the application of animal textures frozen in time (crocodile tile, artificial snake skin upholstery). Semitransparent materials allow surprising views into areas that are usually kept secret (Sensatile).
Outdoor spaces
The outdoor spaces are created out of large, unprogrammed areas with surprising materials and elements. The ‘dry pools’ and ‘dry hot tubs’ can be used for multiple and unforeseen events. The water of the pools has been solidified into large mattress landscapes, waiting for the users to be activated.
What is Graft’s background in hospitality design?
We have extensive experience in hospitality projects of different scale in different locations, some of the realized projects include the Hotel Q, Berlin, Germany; The Emperor Hotel, Beijing, China; Hotel Iveria, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia; Poolscape Restaurant + Bars, City Center, Las Vegas and the Gingko Bacchus Restaurant, Chengdu, China.
Do you have a design motto?
Using this example in botany as a point of departure we understand it at Graft as a phenomenon in human culture and examine its implications for the built environment. We live in an age where the identity of the individual becomes displaced from his original physical context and has to continually find new identities by engaging with local and global environments, enriching new definitions through changed locations and media. How can we define ‘identity in motion’? What is fixed and what is mutable? How can the two conditions in varying states of equilibrium continue to support and benefit one another?
The traditional boundaries of the design profession must be increasingly questioned to include interdisciplinary methods and techniques that as a matter of practice expand the quest for meaning and enrichment. Typically, our research spans a wide variety of archetypes from different sources: high culture, low culture, philosophy, banality, architecture, movies, literature, sports etc. Analysis, communication and thereby the creation of relationships between and across these entities is Graft. Our product refuses to accept the exclusive limitations of artificial borders between disciplines and elements and opens new possibilities for the creation of expansive results. Unexpected and surprising misunderstandings, global transfer of spatial quality, and the production of robust crossbreeds ─ a product derived out of circumstances, which can only be created through the grafting of different realities.
Spread across continents, multiple disciplines and experience levels there is a mix of native and foreign at all locations and in all phases of a Graft project. The consequential connections and adjacencies produced and mutated out of this richness of process both inspire and drive Graft and its body of work.