Alsike Hotel, Sweden

By Sandra Sudhesh, Emma Larrson and Gemma Alcalá.

This project was located in Alsike, a small village bewteen Uppsala and Stockholm city.

From a lighting design based project, the pictures show the decisions taken in relation to indoor and outdoor materials, as well as facade and openings. In other words, they show all the elements that could influence in daylight outcome and artifitial light perception.

The concept started to be developed as soon as we visited the site. We discovered the amount of nature was to be destroyed due to the construction of the hotel and new urban area in Alsike. We immidiately decided to base our project in bringing back the local nature. As can be seen in the moodboard, we translated the textures and characteristics of the field into lighting qualities and architectural elements. Furtheremore, we wanted to incorporate the Alsike flower within the project, which gave us the idea of using layers, weather light or architectural layers.

The four facades consisted on irregular planes, composed by several asymmetric openings which are covered by a second layer of glasses. Those were also placed interchangeably. Such apparent randomness was studied depending on the position of each room or common space in relation to views, position in the Sun Azimut and their closeness to surrounding buildings. The drastic contrast in terms of daylight hours Sweden has, needed to be considered. By doing so, we achieved to fully personalised each room by the quality of daylight they were receiving. Some of the steps made are explained below:

The Standard room shown, located in the second floor of the South facade. It was the nearest room confronting a building. In such case scenario, the two openings that correspond to each room were thought to block views as well as to take advantage of sunlight reflections that are produced during summer.

On the contrary, the Master bedroom shown was located at the top floor, with better views, but in the North facade. There was made a decision to create more openings in the West facade, so the customer can have greater views of the public park. In this case, the second glass layer was chosen to work with views, as there was little chance to get further lighting qualities. In order to maximize the sense of brightness (something difficult to achieve during certain seasons in Sweden) we decided to enhance the contrast between the hall and corridor and the rest of the room by making them darker.

In terms of artifitial light, we divided the customer experience in three posible scenarios, in which lighting levels were different: welcoming to the room or regular tasks, cleaning or packing purposes and relaxing. In case of the Standard room, a false window was designed to contribute to verticality, as well as serving as desk luminaire or ambiance generator. For the Master, we selected decorative luminaires that could distinguish areas and tasks within the space by its lighting distribution.

The selected materials were thought to enhance the desired lighting effects: verticality, linearity, texture, ambiance and focal elements. To see the interiors more in detail, click here.