Taiwan’s southwestern city of Kaohsiung has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Indeed, commercial Xinxing district just east of the harbor has enjoyed bustling growth with Millennials and families regularly swarming to its legendary Liuhe night market for street eats and entertainment. It is within this context that HBA’s Hong Kong office developed a hip and colorful concept to reflect the neighborhood for IHG’s latest Indigo outpost.
The 14-story former department store “was a bit run down, but a very recognizable commercial building,” notes HBA principal Federico Masin. “Part of the reason it was difficult to adapt was that it was a department store in the public’s mind.”
Shanghai branding agency Vocius was retained to develop a comprehensive city narrative that HBA referenced for a sense of the area’s DNA. With an understanding of the nearby harbor’s history, project designers Shichao Zhao and Gigi Kwok set about incorporating elements associated with shipping into the quirky 129-room hotel. “The hotel’s design became a metaphor for Kaohsiung itself, and how its transport of goods transformed the city’s society,” explains Masin.
Working with an odd L-shaped plan, HBA set down an iron anchor to one side of the hot pink reception desk fashioned as stacked boxes. A coil of bulky purple rope melds into bench seating, while a mooring shaped into a bar table features a rainbow of ropes to reinforce the nautical theme.
To bring natural light into the reception area through the all-day dining restaurant Wok on the Park, HBA separated the spaces with porous wire mesh drapery. Along with industrial pendants, a feature wall at the rear of the restaurant resembles a shipping container and is a motion-activated slice of media art that invites selfies. The container theme continues downstairs on the function floor, where meeting rooms are clad in corrugated metal painted in orange and yellow.
HBA developed distinct concepts for the rooms: stylized shipping crates and canned goods for guestrooms, and time pieces for suites in the form of clock hands for bar counters and watches as bathroom mirrors. Terrazzo flooring commonly found in Kaohsiung residences was introduced to reinforce nostalgia, continuing into bathrooms where a blue tile wall and floor-to-ceiling windows look out toward the harbor. As a nod to the hotel’s previous use as a mall, amenities are placed on shelves resembling boutiques in the neighborhood and bar codes become wall décor, offsetting the raw concrete cement and weathering steel accents on corridor walls for a full embrace of the industrial theme.
