While the city of Rovinj, Croatia is home to just 15,000 residents, in the increasingly booming tourism season, its population swells with visitors from around the world seduced by the scenic old town and cobbled, Adriatic-adjacent promenades. The hotel stock is abundant and diverse here, so for the Grand Park Hotel Rovinj, one of the city’s more recent openings, the challenge was to offer both luxury and a point of difference.
Part of the luxury offerings from the locally based Maistra hotel group, the 209-room hotel overlooks Rovinj’s historic center and the surrounding waters. Despite its scale, spread over six floors, Zagreb architecture firm 3LHD devised a plan that minimizes its impact on the landscape: a series of graduated, terraced levels create monumental steps from the highest elevation to the coastline. Five pine trees, which have called the site home for decades, have been incorporated into the first-floor terrace, while substantial planting and dedicated new green spaces create a sense of seamlessness between the manmade and the wider natural environment.
The lobby’s glass bookshelf, which encloses a small meeting room, as seen from the staircase that descends into the all-day restaurant
With two restaurants, two bars, three pools, and a 41,000-square-foot spa, the property offers guests their own self-contained leisure ecosystem, all drawn together by a singular design vision courtesy of Milanese studio Lissoni Casal Ribeiro. “Giving a sense of uniformity and sewing so many spaces together through a shared language was one of the challenges,” explains Piero Lissoni, the practice’s lead, “while also creating an intimate atmosphere in what is a large structure.”
The solution was to develop a clear dialogue between the interior and the location—to “mix different cultures,” says Lissoni—while leaning heavily on the rich and layered history of Rovinj and the region. There’s a stark, almost universal modernity to much of the design, with its strident lines and focus on stone, glass, and wood. The color palette, comprising primarily earth tones and neutrals, is intended to provide a counterpoint to the bright blue tones of the sea and sky, creating a connecting thread between the surroundings and the interiors.
Lissoni’s “dialogue” is arguably most expressed in the artwork, the only hotel collection of its kind in Rovinj. Seven artists were commissioned to create pieces inspired by the city’s geography and history, including Veronica Gaido’s photographs in guestrooms and Roberta Patalani’s vast, site-specific bas-relief that forms a backdrop to the reception area of the promenade lobby.
A glass-walled terrace overlooking the water and old town is among the highlights at Cap Aureo Signature Restaurant
Three different pools, complete with indoor and outdoor sun loungers, are found on the hotel’s fifth floor
The hotel’s neutral palette continues in Primi Terreni Restaurant & Deli, outfitted with a slatted ceiling and raw terracotta-tiled backbar
This article originally appeared in HD’s December 2020 issue.
