Intext is a First Prize award winning hotel design project from 2006. The competition by Norsk Form and 100% Risor called for an open interdisciplinary competition to create the first design hotel in Norway and the scope of the competition was the redesign the rooms of Risor Hotel in Risor, one of Europes best kept wooden house towns.
The floor is inspired by forms of the Risor peninsula, where jetties have formed huge pot-holes for swimming in, and waves have polished the rock silk smooth for sunbathing. The floor, bed and bath form one continuous bathing-sleeping landscape – a private spa.
The design challenged the conventions of what a hotel room is, how it is used and where the functions in a traditional hotel room are placed. A salt-water aquarium divides two hotel rooms, with an electric adjustable glass screen in the middle, which can be opaque or transparent.
An alternate version featured an electronic aquarium, featuring a VersaTile low resolution screen for interactive electronic art and inter-room communication for the new generation.
Or peek into the corridor or let others see into your room through a frosted glass window, features that challenged the traditional boundaries for privacy in a hotel design.
Norwegian artist Marius Watz provided several low resolution digital artworks, one which was used for visualising how art could be used to both colour and light the room and provide an ever changing decoration of the hotel room.
Two and two rooms are connected with floor to ceiling aquarium. Electrocontrolled smart glass is used to allow for the inhabitants to either see through to each other or not. The design of each room is diagonally mirrored in that one room features the bed by the window while the other has the jacuzzi overlooking the view outside.
All the functions of the hotel room are in the one room. One of the sidewalls is a service wall split between the two adjacent rooms containing a WC and wardrobe.