Drawing its name from the Japanese word for family or tribe, Zoku Amsterdam represents a disruption of longstanding hotel design traditions. The concept invites guests to experience the lodging as a second home for extended stays, complete with communal living areas, kitchens, and offices.
Local firm concrete was tapped in 2010 to help bring the bold vision of Zoku co-founders Hans Meyer and Marc Jongerius to life. Housed in the city’s Metropool building along the Weesperstraat, Zoku caters to an array of business travelers coming and going from the city’s major transportation hubs.
“The new work-meets-play hotel concept has been created for and inspired by the global nomad,” says concrete founder and creative director Rob Wagemans. “Zoku creates a new category—a home-office hybrid, also suitable for long stays, with the services of a hotel and the social buzz of a thriving neighborhood.”
Zoku’s founding principles are reflected in the generously sized living area—or the hotel’s communal spaces—laid out in hexagonal shape that Wagemans describes as the project’s defining motif, which “can be found in the architectural shape of the [building’s] crown. Following this zigzag shape, many different kinds of living areas are created.”
Soft materials—like coir carpet over bamboo flooring and cognac leather chairs—and neutral tones add to the hominess of the space and showcase the Scandinavian design, while some tabletops and retro Revolt chairs are finished in blue and custom sofas are upholstered in denim-looking fabrics. Reinforcing tones of green from the flora on display in white transparent cabinets, concrete elected to “bring back some green in the furniture and finishes in order to increase the ambiance,” Wagemans explains.
Custom, dramatic light fixtures create a variety of unique and warm sculpting of light and shadow throughout the space, while floor-to-ceiling windows bring in natural light. In addition to various intimate seating arrangements, a long communal oak table invites collaboration, and sections of oak wood flooring are arranged in more hexagons.
A central bar anchors the living area, inviting guests to brew their own coffee or tap their own beer. The adjacent living kitchen also includes long wooden tables for communal dining and features a hexagon-patterned floor and white wooden walls to add a warm feminine energy to the room. A number of outdoor terraces extend the space, complete with abundant plant life and communal seating.
The team also revitalized the sixth-floor rooftop of the building into an urban garden that provides natural ventilation and rainwater capture, an effort supported in part by the city, where hexagonal plant beds grow some of the ingredients used in the living kitchen. Surrounded by the garden terraces, the simple glass and steel greenhouse structure embodies the design of Dutch greenhouses, emphasizing the outdoors as much as possible.
Drenched in natural light, Zoku Amsterdam’s top floor houses 3,875 square feet of meeting space featuring flexible furniture layouts, whiteboard walls, and even a separate kitchen.
Ranging in size from 258 to almost 500 square feet, Zoku’s 133 innovative guestrooms include fully equipped kitchens and ample storage thanks to their loft layouts. The raised, screened-off sleeping area is accessed via a retractable staircase, shifting the room’s focal point from the bedroom to the living and working space. Visitors are also encouraged to personalize each guestroom by selecting the artwork that adorns the walls.
