Inntel hotel by WAM Architecten

Delft studio WAM Architecten have completed a hotel that looks like a pile of houses in Zaandam, the Netherlands. Named Inntel Hotel, the structure is eleven stories high and features 160 rooms.

A note from the architect:

Wilfried van Winden envisages the hotel as a temporary home, alluding to that transience with the stack of houses. Visually speaking the structure is built up from a varied stacking of almost seventy individual little houses, executed in four shades of the traditional green of the Zaan region. The hotel is unique, familiar yet original and idiosyncratic. It is a design that could be realised only in Zaandam but at the same time transcends and reinvigorates local tradition. It was, moreover, specifically tailored to this site. ‘The Blue House’, inspired by the work Claude Monet painted at Zaandam in 1871, is the ultimate attention-grabber. The overall result is striking, the building exemplary for the Fusion Architecture that Wilfried van Winden champions. Fusion represents an inventive way of linking present and past, tradition and innovation, high culture and low. This generates a novel expressiveness that corresponds to specific local practices but is at the same time universal. ‘But architecture naturally makes a direct appeal to the emotions as well,’ notes Van Winden. ‘An acquaintance recently commented, “When I drive into Zaandam and see the building standing there a smile inevitably spreads across my face.” You could hardly ask for a more wonderful compliment.