Portable Everland Hotel Travels the World
Each stay in Everland is a strange one-of-a-kind trip for the mind as there is only one room in this portable hotel – and it shifts from place to place over time. While it has ridden on the backs of museums and had views of monuments, a night in the bizarre hotel itself is much like a stay in a private art gallery. Each newly-framed artistic landscape allows urban travelers to reflect on their surroundings from unique perspectives previously unseen by other tourists.
This mobile hotel has been perched upon a ancient museum structure in a bustling German city, sat in center of Paris with an ideal elevated view of the Eiffel Tower and rested on an existing luxury hotel in Tokyo with views out over the surrounding city.
Each of these settings has afforded guests – permitted to stay only one night each – amazing never-before-seen angles on familiar landmarks and historical locations.
Conceived of as an installation art project by Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann, the experience of this space is highly customized – each room has a bathroom, lounge and king-sized bed along with playful details including a set of golden bath towels begging to be stolen, a stocked and prepaid minibar, radical classic record collection a breakfast delivered right to the door.
“L/B are well-known for their homely installations that deliberately set out to undermine the boundaries between art and design. Patterns borrowed from the 1970s are one of their trademarks. Carpets, wallpaper or screen-savers (www.langbaumann.com) are decorated with them, not as nostalgic symbols but as a quotation of times past, though they are built into the installations with the utmost precision, and thus generate their own environment.”
“L/B are notorious for inclining towards the Gesamtkunstwerk. The Hotel Everland is designed down to the last door handle, all the elements match to produce a kind of artistic fiction. This is also central to the two artists’ project: «In terms of economics, a hotel with one room is an absurd idea. So guests should note that a kind of ideal hotel room has been created here, from start to finish.”
“We wanted to construct a totally integral unit with – as far as we could see – nothing missing that the heart could desire. We treated and designed every detail as equally important. The whole thing is a very subjective statement that we hope will please other people, enthuse them or perhaps even be able to make them start dreaming.» And indeed the capsule is reminiscent of a space-ship, catapulted into another world of ideas or dreams.”
“When artists construct hotel rooms, their interests are positioned differently, and their curiosity, their visions, aims and the way they are implemented, are different from those of architects. So seeing the work of art as a field of action and not a mere object is crucially important. This means there is no fear of possibly asking too much of guests. It is this artistic focus that makes the difference. Even though health-and-safety regulations had to be and were met, the artistic hotel room is something that is far from being a mere service, and possibly would not work in combination with several rooms. The Hotel Everland is exemplary in every respect: it is a vision of the hotel ‘model’, a trip to another (Ever-)land, a paradox of public privacy that unlike the exposed position of the Big Brother container is equally respectable for all partners. “
