The 2013 Sleep ReardonSmith Student Award has gone to James Young, a fourth-year student studying for his masters in architecture at the Canterbury School of Architecture.
Revealed at the European Hotel Design Awards in London, the award recognizes architectural or interior design students in Europe. This year’s competition was to plan a luxury hotel and residential marina development on the Southern Adriatic coast. The plan would involve a 120-room hotel on a 602,779-square-foot site forming a small peninsula with beach coves to either side. The resort was to include a variety of suites, food and beverage facilities, a destination spa, retail shops along the marina, and residential accommodation consisting of 20 private villas and 20 apartments.

“Our aim is to inspire today’s budding talent to think seriously about the design of hotels and resorts, which is an economically and culturally significant sector, while having fun,” says Patrick Reardon, executive chairman of ReardonSmith. “When we launched a European Hotel Design Award for students years ago and then re-introduced it in collaboration with the Sleep conference in 2012, it was because we wanted to encourage young, hard-working, and gifted people to feel inspired to take up a career in hotel design.”

Young’s winning response uses the concept of agri-tourism, creating a heightened sense of locality and interaction by inviting guests to holiday within an Adriatic community while learning about the art of agriculture and farming. The resort is embedded within a productive landscape whose terraced design stems from the topography of the site, and its hotel, private villas, and apartments benefit from rooftop planting. Instructors would farm the land year round and live in the resort community.
“Winning the Sleep ReardonSmith student award, as well as being a great honor, has also reassured me that movement outside of my comfort zone is a great way to discover my own abilities,” says Young. “It’s great to have my work recognized by a leader in the field of hotel design, making all of the long hours drawing, designing, and re-drawing worth it.”
