Courtyard By Marriott Hong Kong Shatin
Main Lobby Fitting-Out
1 Sha Tin New Territories
On Ping St, Hong Kong
GFA 32,500 sq.m
Construction 2009 - 2012
This is my first hotel lobby design and I thought it is much larger than most hotels' lobbies in Hong Kong. It is very spacious, with lots of sunlight coming in, it would be totally our fault if the lobby was done bad, given that we have such a great space to design. There are actually some standards written by Marriott that we have to follow, but mostly just in the reception desk, so they could place their equipment inside. The center of stair is the base point of everything, the radiant pattern expands out, forming the slab edge of the first floor hallway above. For materials, we went with soft limestone with bronze color metal as highlights at different areas. All the walls in the lobby was cladded with 600 x 1200 x 40mm thick hanged Travertine stone panels. The floors are layed with 25mm thick Santeony limestone.
One of the main features of the lobby is the spiral staircase. Since our love of I M Pei, we were inspired to his stair tread detail at the Louvre. So we had our stone supplier to carve out the treads similar to that detail. This detailing, along with the 500mm deep treads, makes the stair looks very attractive and rich. Stonework was just excellent. The stair is held by two hollow steel tube at the bottom, is actually kind of shaky when you walk on it, but totally safe. Even the cruved aluminum panels were done well, except that the joint widths are too big. For interior panelings we should not be required to have such big movement and expansion joints, but we didn't know at the time. However this is the best stair I ever done.
For the glass sculpture, we hired an artist called Nikolas Weinstein based in California, who did the fantastic design and installation with his team of people. Thousands of glass tubes were tied by wires together to form a ribbon, seemingly floating freely on top of the lobby ceiling, it just created so much dynamics and they look the best at night with spotlights washing upon them. There are hundreds of hanging wires suspended from the ceiling in order hold this sculpture in the air. There are many other similar sculptures that installed in different countries, one of them is in Hong Kong in a Swire building and one of them in OPUS. His team were also very quick at assembling the sculpture. I remember they could do it in matter of 2 to 3 weeks.
This suspended light is the star of the ballroom. They are made with numbers of acrylic crystal with led strips inside each crystal. They can all be dimmed according to different occation.
Overall, we spent a lot of time helping contractor to get the right form and dimensions before production. Having a responsible contractor with attention to details is almost critical to a successful project, I am glad we got this contractor and we had a good time working on the project. We like this project a lot and we even held our company’s 60th anniversary dinner in the ballroom. Even now you can sometimes see this ballroom being utilized in movies and TV shows. I am proud to be part of the creators of this project and hopefully can create even better ones.