Inside Festival 2015: in this exclusive movie, Rodney Eggleston of March Studio explains how the Australian firm used over 5000 lengths of reclaimed wood to create the award-winning interior for a Canberra hotel.
March Studio designed the ground floor spaces of Hotel Hotel, a hotel in Canberra, Australia, developed by 50 different artists, designers and makers.
The Melbourne-based studio's design, which was named World Interior of the Year 2015 at Inside Festival last month, features thousands of planks of reclaimed wood that are fixed around the walls and ceiling with steel rods.
"The brief here was to use recycled materials," says March Studio director Eggleston. "We looked at ways of creating almost an instant patina, something that already had character and age."
March Studio sourced most of the wood for the project directly from the site of the hotel itself.
"There were formwork beams that were lying around in piles, there were offcuts from the facade," Eggleston explains. "There was all this timber that had been used to make the whole building and we thought this was a great opportunity to do something with all those offcuts."
The ground floor area of the hotel, which runs between the building's two entrances, comprises the reception, concierge and bar. March Studio also designed the main staircase, where lengths of wood are laminated together to form steps.
"The main entrance by foot is through the grand staircase," Eggleston says. "The timber creates a directional vortex that leads you up the stair and into the hotel."
The lobby area leads through to the bar, which features exposed concrete and black steel panels.
"The bar is very utilitarian," Eggleston says. "It's a combination of materials that get better with age."
March Studio used a combination of wood and concrete to create other spaces throughout the ground floor of the hotel, including a small outdoor courtyard and seating area.
"These two walls – one made of concrete, one made of recycled timber – snake around the whole perimeter of the project, creating areas to sit, areas to work," Eggleston explains. "Then they head outside to create a secret garden."
This movie was produced by Dezeen for Inside Festival. It was filmed at Inside Festival 2015 in Singapore. All photographs are courtesy of March Studio, unless otherwise stated.
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Inside Festival 2015 took place in Singapore from 4 to 6 November, alongside partner event World Architecture Festival. Dezeen is media partners for both events and will be publishing more video interviews with the winners over the coming weeks.
