The new Kimpton Vividora Hotel, located in Barcelona’s Old City, offers a genuine Spanish experience. Designed by El Equipo Creativo, these unique spaces, rooms, and restaurants reflect the Barcelonian lifestyle, with a chic, cheerful, and fresh atmosphere, just like the city itself.

Kimpton Hotels are unique boutique hotels, with no uniform brand design, offering genuine and local experiences. Kimpton Hotels like to describe themselves as a brand that “offers luxury without the attitude”, with locally loved restaurants and bars and a very personal style. The briefing was to create a Hotel with a local approach, handcrafted and custom-designed, with unique spaces that reflect Barcelona’s lifestyle and architecture.

The design strategy is to create a dialogue between the Hotel and Barcelona, and more specifically, a close connection with the neighbourhood where the property is located. Ciutat Vella, meaning Old City, which is indeed the oldest part in town, is undoubtedly a different area with its slow pace of life; an artsy neighbourhood with an old body and a young soul: small pedestrian streets, full of museums, street art, small shops, traditional bars and cafes, improvised skate parks, etc.

The idea is to create different and unique spaces inside the hotel, inviting both guests and locals to stay, enjoy, meet, and interact. They all reflect the local lifestyle, with a chic and joyful atmosphere, unforcedly elegant and genuine at the same time. The design brings handcrafted elements, local brands, and art, colourful ceramic patterns, together with reinterpreted references to its historical past, mixed with a contemporary spontaneous design approach that gives Vividora Hotel a unique, energetic personality.

One of the challenges was organising the public program, as the street level was especially small. The strategy was using this street-level exclusively for the bar. Cafe Got acts as a connection between the city and the hotel: an active space with a long façade facing the street, inviting guests and locals to enter and interact.

The lobby area is located on a mezzanine level. A double-height space connects it with the bar while bringing a watery effect to space through a cascade of glass lamps. Three stones perform as reception desks, referencing the stone fountains in the Gothic patios.

The lobby space is completed with a lounge area and a co-working table.

Barcelona is a really colourful city. Still, if the team had to select only two, those would be, without a doubt, the warm terracotta tones of its architecture, and the fresh bluish tones of the Mediterranean Sea. As in an abstract art composition, the team brings two protagonists color-blocks to the Vividora rooms: the warm leather headboard in the sleeping area opposed to the colder bluish crafted ceramic dividers of the bathroom area.

The bathroom area is one of the protagonists, as it is visually connected to the rest of the room. This strategy helps us broaden the spatial feeling, also bringing natural light into the washbasin and the shower area, behind this glazed wall.

In the suite rooms, the designers bring a similar color, temperature, and material strategy based on playing with contrasts and opposites.

But in this case with upgraded comfort features, as a stylish living room area or the extraordinary experience of a bathtub facing the private balcony and the views of the city from the highest floor of the building.

Photographer: Adrià Goula, One Represent Agency