A few years ago the East Hotel in Hamburg, Germany was the mossy skeleton of an old brick and concrete iron foundry sitting windowless and tattooed with graffiti on the edge of the harbor-side red-light district of St. Pauli, where the Beatles got their start.
Now the old foundry building houses an extraordinarily successful hospitality business made up of four lounges, a restaurant, a bar, and connects to a new boutique hotel
The 250 seat restaurant 32’ ceilings with four sets of 28 foot tall glass doors that open onto a courtyard / garden-lounge. A sculpted plaster wall encloses private dining rooms at the cellar, a beanbag stuffed Lounge at entry level, and the elegant skybox, called the Smirnoff Lounge, overlooking the restaurant. Across the main dining room, a sixty foot long bar spills out into the lobby and onto a terrace overlooking the garden. The new building houses sixty five guest rooms, a rooftop spa and sixty subterranean parking spaces.
The popularity of East compelled the owners to expand from 77 rooms to 130.
Like all projects, East was a team effort. The founders and managers include real estate developer Thomas Kreye of Kreye und Partner, restaurant entrepreneur Christoph Strenger and Roland Koch, bar developer Marc Ciunas and hotel manager Annemarie Bauer. The design efforts were led by Jordan Mozer and Associates Limited, of Chicago. Kreye und Partner provided the local architecture services with a team led by architect Edgar Stofferson.
The design was inspired by the old foundry and the cast forms it produced, ideas about the balance between global and local culture infused with personal (non-universal) Asian memory fragments tempered with an Eastern approach to nature as a positive spiritual element. The project began with the question, ”How can the design elicit an emotional response similar to a Westerner in Asia the first time?”
The design was inspired by molten and cast forms metal, old factories, fat raindrops,the palette of Kathmandu, unexpected shifts of scale and form, the justapositino of familiar and strange, ancient and modern, the idea of a nature as the embodiment of spirituality.
Almost every design element in the interior of old foundry and new hotel was designed and fabricated especially for East by Jordan Mozer and Associates, Ltd.