Green is good: luxury hospitality spaces with verdurous surfaces

As an interiors colour, green is incredibly on trend, symbolising our renewed vigour for environmental care. But we want our environments to look and feel good, as well as make us feel good about ourselves and the world around us, too. Synonymous with the environment as well as environmentalism, green replenishes our connection with, and psychological design for, nature.

Steeped in ideas of both history and luxury, green is also the colour of rare gemstones like jade and emerald, and of high-quality and success in British racing green in everything from race cars to retail. These four hospitality spaces utilise green surfaces to form organic, sensory environments, each with an edge of style and luxury.

Lavishly coated in swathes of rich Madagascar green fluted walls, combined with luxurious Udaipur greenstone marble tabletops and bar, the Fluted Emerald Elgin Café realises luxurious dining in an environment akin to a tropical garden. ‘The idea’, explains architects RENESA Architecture Design Interiors Studio, ‘was to create an atmosphere and feel of the outdoors, where you would find yourself surrounded by greenery.’

With contrasting yet also reaffirming elements of cane furniture and lighting, along with gold accents, the venue’s state of organic luxury wraps its clientele in the welcoming and fertile embrace of nature, with exotic wildlife almost audible in the background.

In contrast to the Fluted Emerald Elgin Café, the LULU Bar in Lisbon, Portugal, restricts itself to just the subtlest touch of green in its permanent interior surfaces, a green-tinted corrugated mirror wall at one end of the seating plan, forming part of a colour palette that blends dark, seaweed green with bright pink, then calms it all down again with white walls.

Along with its geometric tricolour floors and white walls and ceilings, however, the bar’s fourth surface is lighting. ‘Meticulous artificial lighting,’ comments the project’s architects DC.AD, ‘provides changes between various scenarios and a total alteration of the space.’ These expressive lighting configurations transform the bar from a stylish but quiet space during the day, to a buzzing, vibrant hotspot at night.

At the Cara Mela Bakery in the Chamberí area of Madrid, haute cuisine is lovingly combined with faster-paced take-away culture. With a constantly revolving menu based on customer input and feedback, the specialist pastry shop, loosely translated as ‘Dear Apple’, is a love letter to the fruit, in its sweetest form.

‘We did not want to be the typical pretty and tender pastry shop,’ shares bakery owner Valeria Monsalve, ‘but rather we wanted something different, innovative and between modern and classic.’ Different is certainly what they got. After ordering their chosen sweet treat, customers proceed through into the bakery’s central ‘green room’ to await its arrival. Covered from half-way down – just like one of the shop’s famous apples – the green-tiled room mimics the fate of its main ingredient, draping the interior with ‘its own universe of caramelised shapes,’ justifies architects Casa Antillón.

Although Beijing’s Green Cloud House bookstore is not traditionally a hospitality venue, a recent interior makeover rediscovered the space as an interior landscape garden, with the restful tranquility of a spa. With the additional functionalities of a bookstore and tearooms, the environment’s main purpose is one of calm reflection.

Green surfaces surrounding the tiled central pond rise up to imitate the natural topography of mountains, valleys and lakes. ‘The up and down flowing changes of the terraces make various postures of the pavilions,’ explains the Green Cloud House architects, Jiejie Studio, while accompanying steps and walkways form bridges and walkways, over which customers can dangle their feet and comfortably lose themselves in another world of literature.

© Architonic

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