New Urban Behaviour. Transforming How We Use Hotels

BOOK YOUR STAY IN PURO WARSAW OLD TOWN

Warsaw is busier than usual. Tourists and Varsovians are creating a vibrant energy in the capital’s old town. A business executive is going for lunch, a frequent traveller is jumping into a cab, and a curious young professional is attending a seminar, a whirlwind of different moods and focuses on attending. Born in Italy and Denmark, Enrico Fratesi and Stine Gam met while studying. Today, they are the couple behind the successful GamFratesi studio, a fusion between southern and northern European design, a cross-cultural study that received significant awards over the last two decades collaborating with brands including Bang & Olufsen, Acqua di Parma, Cappellini, Dedon, De Padova, Gubi, Fritz Hansen, Hermès, Louis Poulsen, Porro, Poltrona Frau, Minotti, Gebruder Thonet Vienna, Kvadrat. The studio came from architecture and is perhaps best known for industrial products, but it is, deep down, an all-around design studio. And precisely for that reason, Rune Askevold, PURO co-founder and CEO, approached them with an all-encompassing hospitality project in Warsaw. “We are both educated as architects, but we are known for furniture design and smaller interiors, so when we received the invitation to design a complete hotel together with PURO, it was beautiful. It felt like an organic progression, since the brand has used our furniture over the years and found quality, beautiful aesthetics and function in our products,” Enrico Fratesi, co-founder of GamFratesi, explains. 

The design of an entire hotel is an impressive one: the studio has not done anything as big before. “Rune asked us: ‘Why don’t you try to think about the whole frame?’ And for us, it opened a great opportunity to express our sense of hospitality through a 360-degree immersion,” Stine Gam, co-founder of GamFratesi, adds. The studio excels in creating an atmosphere, which the duo quickly brings up in our conversation, “We want to create culture,” says Fratesi. We talk about hotel culture in Warsaw specifically and delve into the new building. “Seeing the size of the plot and how the space is distributed, we immediately discussed how to create a hotel culture that felt like a home; an intimate setting,” Gam says and expands, “Even if it’s a new building, it was categorised as a smaller space, so we thought, why don’t we approach these rooms as a big apartment or a villa. We create smaller rooms so that you can go all around on the ground floor, and every time you have a different experience. So, it’s designed like at home; you have the more intimate area at the entrance, which opens into a social lounge room. Then you go to the kitchen, almost like a Nobel apartment.”

Is building culture about bringing new aspects in or balancing existing elements well? “The main behaviour changing hospitality today is that you don’t want to be treated too much like a tourist when you travel. Most people are more drawn to a place with local people, that feels more like a home. Regarding interiors, I think people come to a hotel and look to be inspired, thinking, ‘I want my home to be like that’. As a designer, you must inspire that thought,” says Fratesi. When we think of a home, there is also an informal space behaving differently than many other hotels. “Hospitality is becoming soft, more informal and home-like,” Gam agrees. “Hotels are becoming less flashy; you don’t make a shiny concept just to be memorable anymore. Instead, a distinct memory might be a room where you have dinner and a lovely time, feeling like everything works together. It is a memory divided into small elements. Still, if you add it up, it’s a perfectly time-balanced situation: lights, furniture, materials, comfort, food,” Fratesi continues. “That is also how I experience my life: being an Italian living in Copenhagen. I think this balance is very much Scandinavian culture.”

In this transition, we still need to understand the role of the hotel or what it can become. What is at the horizon for the home-hotel? Is this the time when informal needs are met, and hotels begin to adopt a softer, less utilitarian design approach? What happens with that space with time? “The hotel today is a softer place, more fragile if you like, but people accepted the patina in all of that. With time, this hotel will tell a story; it will change, but it will change through behaviour that shape it,” Gam says. “This has been the Scandinavian philosophy for 50-60 years, and there are still products out there that are beautiful, and people love them, and they are telling the same story as we are trying to tell now, only in a more contemporary way,” she adds. “The project is so versatile it can express itself in many ways. There are many small rooms and multiple stories taking place simultaneously. There are many different rooms and aspects to it, and what you feel in one room changes radically compared to the other, especially in the common room on the ground floor. This is also how life is; sometimes, you feel one way or the other. This is how it should be. It should give space for flexibility and personality.”

In this way, PURO is more contemporary than its peers. It feels like it’s a place where different and perhaps newly adopted behaviours convene. “People are different. Look at your friends; one of them is loud, another quiet, one social and one more intimate person, yet you keep seeing them all your life; you have different approaches to them. It is the same when you create interiors. We always try to create objects that stay frank with all these personalities, respecting behaviours in the environment. Maybe the materials speak to you, so you feel something and want to treat things nicely,” Gam explains.

Hearing all this, I am keen to explore the curation, understanding the seemingly personal selection of things, and the hand-picked objects that constitute the interiors. “It’s a good mix; there are some historical products, some contemporary, and some vintage. This is what we think creates the feeling of a home. It’s a good collection you might have; some things are old, and some are new. The important thing is that it does not look like a catalogue; even the visitors cannot buy exactly what they see, but something similar. We tried to get this feeling that the selection is unique,” Fratesi says. “If you look at the materials, we have selected some of the oldest craftsmanship available. The bricks are handmade, and the wood comes from a special company in Denmark. All the products have a story, which is also what people should aim for in their homes; no one wants to live in a catalogue. We are tired of things being too perfect.”

We talk about what they have learnt throughout the project, and it is evident that the human condition has steered this project from the start. “The biggest challenge is that the interior must hold any behaviour. We had to use that challenge constructively, trying to include it as early as possible by creating a frame for people to enjoy being whoever they are,” Gam argues. “But it has been a learning curve,” Fratesi adds, “When we jump in scale, from doing furniture to designing an entire hotel, we discover many new things, and we learn a lot about our products.”              

The hotel is a new forum for locals and travellers to come and be themselves, at home, in a Scandinavian setting. What does this mean for Warsaw? “I would love it if someone would say, I like this room but not the other. If people used the diversity we created to fit their needs. In the morning, perhaps you feel more like a dynamic room, and in the evening, you might want to sit somewhere else, or if you come alone, you feel like sitting on the sofa in there, you have different options,” Gam says. “People are different, and we want to give them possibilities with good value, then we have something to offer that is unique every time to very different people.”

In the end, we come back to the shift in behaviour and the evolving role of hotels. “You cannot decide for a hotel to become a classic; it happens dynamically. But good materials age in a beautiful way. This place can hold for a long time and adapt; it can allow you to change things without losing your soul. We want it to be a natural evolution, giving space to evolving,” Fratesi concludes, “Maybe it’s about the evolution of behaviour in public space, creating flexibility for emotion and ability to adapt. It is about becoming that favourite place in Warsaw for the many.”

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