Bunk bed booths provide sleeping sanctuaries at this hostel in Split, Croatia, by local designer Lana Vitas Gruić (+ slideshow).

The new hostel houses 15 beds divided between two rooms accessed from a lobby, which features branding also by Gruić of Atom Design.

In the largest room, colourful units with simple white rails and ladders each house two beds, while the blue block in the centre of the largest room is double-sided to accommodate four.

Two more units are situated in a smaller all-white room, with an extra bed raised high above the ground that appears to balance on lockers.

Desks and shelves accompanied by a mixture of chair styles offer space for guests to eat or use laptops within the dorms.

Photos of lesser-known sites around the city have been blown up to cover walls.

Owners Mila and Toni Radan worked with Gruić to convert the disused apartment, located close to the city's port and historic Diocletian's Palace. "From the beginning, it was our desire to create a comfortable, functional and modern space that has the spirit of a Split street," they say.

Recently we published a story about five wooden cabins that fan out around a site on Tokyo Bay to form capsule accommodation.

Other projects in Croatia include a fashion boutique with rubber-coated fabric pinned to the walls and a house with one storey the dramatically overhangs the floor below.

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New hostel in Split

Split has got a new hostel. Emanuel Hostel is located in Tolstoy Street and is part of the apartment house from the first half of the 20th century. Mila and Toni Radan, the owners of the hostel, adapt completely ruined apartment into a hostel with 15 beds. Toni, who is otherwise engaged in adaptations of similar objects, creates forms and deployment of space, and interior design and visual identity is done by Split designer Lana Vitas Gruić (Atom Design Studio).

From the beginning, it was our desire to create a comfortable, functional and modern space that has the spirit of a Split street. The design was created as a product of fusion, conjuction of the hostel's name meaning, identity of the Mediterranean climate and the tendency of creating a design hostel. The style is eclectic, as evidenced by the contrast of clear, modern lines of bed forms with chairs and accessories from the 50s and 60s of the last century.

In addition to being a place to relax, refresh and sleep, the hostel can serve as a space for socialising - a kind of a living room with internet service and free breakfast so it does not have exclusively a transitional character of typical of hostels, but a warm, pleasant and airy space that is not only a "dorm".

Since in the Mediterranean life is always happening outside, on the streets, and there is a strong culture of cafes, we transferred that same street and exterior onto the hostel's interior walls with photos of Split motifs. To avoid banalisation, photo-wallpapers' motifs are not the much-vaunted ones of Split such as towers, peristyle, waterfront or street moments of a full market-place and fish-market. We have tried to achieve a fine blend of an outdoor and indoor living, a street object like barrel beside an armchair which is part of someone's living room. From such approach we interpret relaxed quality, almost modesty, that nonetheless does not occur by accident, but as a result of a methodical work and experience.

Hostel Emanuel is a place with a story and a family project which primarily arises from the enthusiasm and the special spirit of its owners and all who participated in that process.