Arriving guests pass through the ground floor lounge, and ascend to a dedicated hotel lobby and champagne bar on the first floor, housed within the hotel‚ a main spatial event‚ a nine-storey high pyramid, clad entirely in white marble, with a highly reflective, black polished granite floor. The project is the first hotel – the ME Hotel in London – in which everything, from the shell of the building to the bathroom fittings, has been designed by Foster + Partners. As a result, the drama of the interior spaces is provided by the bold geometry of the structure‚ the challenge for the design was to complement and not detract from, the 80 foot high top-lit space. The minimal furnishings were custom-made and include a 30-metre-long curving bench, sleek black reception desks and a freestanding triangular champagne bar. Rather than works of art that interrupt the space, the projections celebrate its scale, a giant jellyfish rise upwards as if from the depths of the sea, and the triangulated panels of the marble cladding are illuminated and animated like origami. The project won the fifth edition of the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards as Best Bar.
