Camille Walala creates Lego dream house in London, Adidas takes another step toward sustainability, and Ace Hotel readies for its Kyoto debut. All this and more in this week’s Five.
Camille Walala creates Lego dream house in London
French artist Camille Walala evokes imagination and playfulness with House of Dots, a life-sized interactive installation at Coal Drops Yard in London’s King Cross made with two million Lego Dots. Spread across eight shipping containers, the immersive, two-story house comprises five colorful rooms, including a monochromatic bathroom, a Memphis-style bedroom, a bold and primary kitchen, a lounge that uses the full range of Dot colors, and a backlit disco room. “I gave each room a unique palette so the spaces would have a completely different atmosphere,” Walala told Dezeen. The highlight: an 8-foot slide that guests use to exit—the perfect addition to a kid’s dream house, the artist says.
Ace Hotel readies for Kyoto debut
Ace Hotel Group’s newest outpost is set to debut in Kyoto in April. Conceived by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma in collaboration with the brand’s longtime partner, Los Angeles-based Commune Design, the hotel marks Ace’s first property in Japan and will feature an East-meets-West aesthetic, taking cues from the city’s Shinto shrines, temples, and landscaped gardens. The hotel comes just as Japan is experiencing a hotel boom thanks, in part, to the Olympics coming to Tokyo this summer, with a National Stadium also spearheaded by Kuma.
Adidas launches new fabric made out of plastic waste
Adidas will roll out to products filled with Primeblue, a polyester made from recycled plastics collected from beaches and coastal communities, preventing the waste from polluting the oceans, Forbes reports. Adidas also expanded its partnership with environmental organization Parley for the Oceans to use the Primeblue material as a sustainable choice for a new synthetic football field at Miami Edison High School. Joining Primeblue in June is Primegreen, a performance fabric that contains no virgin plastic, which is part of the brand’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint by 30 percent and become climate neutral by 2050.
Floating hotels set to dock in Doha for FIFA World Cup 2022
As host city of the FIFA World Cup in 2022, Doha is planning 16 floating hotels to help meet the 60,000 hotel rooms FIFA requires for the event, according to Yahoo Finance. Located in a shipping yard, a semi-submersible vessel will host 1,616 rooms with construction conceived by two Finnish firms—alternative real estate construction company Admares and Sigge Architects, which is handling the interiors. The four-story, pre-assembled hotels will be located on the city’s Qetaifan Island North, in walking distance to the Lusail Stadium, where the tournament will take place.
Startup hotel brand Life House raises $30 million in funding
New York-based hotel company Life House announced it raised $30 million from a group of investors, including actor-turned-tech entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher. As part of the company’s Series B fundraising led by Thayer Ventures, the three-year-old startup plans to expand its footprint with 25 properties opening by early next year. Founder Rami Zeidan conceived the company to fix the hotel industry through technical innovation, using proprietary software to provide hotels with much more effective management systems while reducing operational costs. “The hotel industry is broken, leaving hotel owners with painfully unprofitable hotels and travelers with expensive or suboptimal hotel experiences,” Zeidan said in a press release. “Most of these problems are solved with software, while others are solved with innovation in the supply chain of our services.”
