A new hotel in the Dutch town of Zaandam turns heads with its intense collection of traditional gables, windows, and roofs, seemingly piled up together. Countering the bland anonymity of so many tourist hotels, Architect Wilfried van Winden sought to create a place-specific experience for hotel guests, expressive of Zaandam itself:
The idea for its design came to Van Winden while he was thinking about the nature of hotels in town centres. These, he thinks, should be more like a "home from home" rather than concrete boxes. In the Inntel's 160 bedrooms, everyone gets to live in a little house rather than an anonymous space that, however plush, could be in Amsterdam or Auckland. Guests are already taking photographs, so they can tell friends and family: "Look where I stayed!"....All the facades you see, explains the architect, are based on traditional Zaanstad houses. "From a stately notary's dwelling," he says, "to workers' cottages." Van Winden's favourite is a re-creation, high up, of a blue house that features in a work by Claude Monet, painted during a trip to Zaandam.
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