Nature meets neon. That’s the concept the New York office of BHDM Design was tasked with when repositioning the Shoreline Hotel Waikiki in Honolulu’s most tourist-clogged area. Originally built as housing for flight attendants on long-haul layovers, the 135-room hotel’s new look, complete with red corridors and topographic corrugated plastic maps of Hawaii over the beds, was informed by the state’s rampant foliage and wildlife, all seen through a saturated lens.

“We wanted visitors to be awash in an eternal sunset,” explains firm founder Dan Mazzarini, so his team “decided to amp up the chroma and intensity of colors—more like the rainbows seen throughout Hawaii. We tempered it with a lot of white, places for the eye to rest.” One example is in the lobby, where white shutters diverge from electric yellow, magenta, and deep blue furnishings.

A blue-to-pink ombré wall outside and a neon rendition of the word “Aloha” at reception greet guests. And along with vivid tropical murals from artist DJ Neff found in a staircase and poolside, a bespoke art installation by Canadian studio Moss & Lam cleverly solves the challenge of the indoor-outdoor lobby volume and brings another layer of animation to the property: 400 overlapping white cut-styrene leaves cascade 22 feet down five walls. “They’re only partially connected, so they still move in the breeze,” says Mazzarini. “At night, they’re all lit with colorful LEDs and the jungle walls become washed in color. The light translates through the façade, so from the street, we’ve created this colorful cube, a sort of new calling card for the property.”