Urban Villa London by Grzywinski+Pons

Urban Villa is a 100 room hotel in west London, designed by Grzywinski+Pons. The property is a hybrid between a boutique hotel and serviced apartments — two programs that are generally mutually exclusive. The brief was to bring a design-led bespoke hospitality feel to a product within a portion of a newly built and largely residential tower, which was found to be rather prosaic and sterile.

“The first step of our intervention within the existing building was subtractive — revealing structure and services where we could.” On the ground floor the reception was designed to double as a full bar, taking both cues and inspiration from traditional English public houses — pubs — where historically there were rooms to let and the barkeeper doubled as an innkeeper. The palette is bright and welcoming yet robust and functional — “an environment where it felt just as natural to ask for extra towels as it would to order a cocktail.”

The lobby also hosts a cafe designed for the same day-to-night mutability. A series of communal tables and more private breakout spaces sit between screens and under ceiling rafts. “We wanted to balance the abundant glazing and high ceilings with vertical breaks, warm and authentic materials, lush vegetation and texture.” The space, while legible, light washed and convivial, is subtly apportioned into varying degrees of public and private space though void of any walls.

In the guest rooms the designers focused on designing custom furniture and a finish schedule that would be congruent with the aforementioned public spaces. “It is our hope that the spaces that comprise Urban Villa feel quite divergent from those which make up the rest of the building — that we managed to create an atmosphere that belies its shell and injected some heterogeneity into an otherwise uniform environment.”

Great West Road, Brentford, London, TW8 0GP
urbanvilla.com