Hotel Mera Brasserie by LOFT Magdalena Adamus // Sopot, Poland.

Hotel restaurants are really “interesting” places, aren’t they? By “interesting” I mean boring. This huge generalisation doesn’t apply to every single hotel of course – I am just being slightly melodramatic in proving my point, so bare with me. In this day and age where every hotel design brief I’ve ever come across calls for a “destination restaurant”, very few manage to get there. Despite all the aspirational chit-chat bouncing between clients, designers and project managers, most new and refurbished hotel restaurants end up looking corporate, generic and devoid of personality. Quite frankly, this makes me a little bit sad. So why is that?

Perhaps because many of the hotel operators are heavily influenced by their facility and operations teams who take a short-sited view that performance is the most important design criteria – i.e. everything needs to be easy to clean, maintain and repair, all furniture needs to match so that it can be easily replaced or swapped around (and preferably made in China). Etcetera, etcetera.

And so we come to today’s little puppy – Brasserie at Hotel Mera, located in a seaside town of Sopot in Poland. It was designed by a Polish studio LOFT Magdalena Adamus. As an aside, I believe today is the first time we are travelling to Poland together. I hope you guys brought your passports. Anyway! What I really like about this place is the way it balances the serious with the casual. It is sharp and carefully put together, yet it remains easy and playful. There is a clarity in planning, streamlined detailing and simplicity in materials, which are offset by a quirky mix of furniture and lighting. This winning combination is precisely what makes the space sing. I also love the way the designers managed the transition from the large, white, open dining space through to smaller and darker dining room by carefully tuning the colour selection and the finishes palette.

Beautifully Polish(ed).

Boom Boom.