Lush Otel-Sıraselviler

Istanbul, Türkiye

The Lush Otel-Sıraselviler is the result of a redesign and renovation project undertaken by architect Elif Özdemir. The project transformed a one hundred year old building, totaling 1200 meters square, into a boutique hotel and restaurant by Architecture-Decoration Projects and the Architecture-Decoration Administration. The building's original design as a housing unit supported its future use as a hotel. In the renovated design, all the rooms were designed in the style of apartment building flats. The overall design’s theme developed by interpreting and recreating different cultural and architectural styles found in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district over the last century, through a contemporary point of view.

The building’s neoclassical facade was preserved and the original details of the building were renovated; 3.50-4.50 m floors were designed to include 22 rooms with different sizes, the restaurant, the lobby, the kitchen and service facilities.

Names like cedar room, classic room, art nouveau room, thonet room, brutal room, transparent room, the room close to the ground, and mariner’s room were given to realize and explain the each room's unique style. Where roof height allowed, usage of mid floors widened the perspective of the rooms, as seen in the bunks beds of mariner’s room, or extra floor of the squire room. 

The result ultimately achieved the project's intentions to deliver a feeling of “Istanbul rooms” without compromising general hotel room conformity, or users’ habits and tastes. The final product enriched the idea of “preservation” beyond just that of physical preservation, both maintaining and strengthening the notion of the site as a “Hip Hotel”, or “Design Hotel."