BARCELONA — Most design-led hotels
claim to take inspiration from location and
local culture. Sir Hotels, which is present
in six destinations across Europe, creates a
unique visual narrative for each of its hotels,
and makes an effort to buck location-specific
visual cues and established local styles.
Barcelona’s Sir Victor is the latest to
join the brethren. It’s named after Victor Cat-
alà, a renowned female writer of Catalonia’s
late 18th-century modernista movement (She
used a male nom de plume, as was common
at the time). With this as a starting point, the
concept for the hotel is duality and layering,
and a more profound reading of what the city
stands for.
In a hyper-branded city like Barce-
lona, this is no easy task. And the project
presented another challenge: up until Sir
Hotels acquired the property, it was Hotel
Omm, Barcelona’s first, and much cherished,
‘design hotel’.
Back in 2003, as Barcelona was on the
cusp of entering the top 10 of world tourist
destinations, a prominent family business
commissioned architect Juli Capella to design
a hotel, a striking edifice with a distinctive
white stone façade featuring balconies that
resemble the open windows of an Advent
calendar. Inside, Hotel Omm employed a
rich Scandinavian-inspired design language- totally new for the time – and peppered it
with contemporary, and often unsung, icons
of Catalan creativity, making Hotel Omm an
institution in design circles.
‘We didn’t want to be known as
the designers who destroyed Hotel Omm!’
exclaims Irene Kronenberg, who, along with
her partner Alon Baranowitz, make up their
eponymous, Tel Aviv-based design studio.
Sir Victor is their fourth project for the group,
complementing Sir Joan in Ibiza, Sir Savigny
in Berlin and Sir Albert in Amsterdam.
They were put in charge of overhauling the
ground-floor lobby, bar and restaurant area,
a 500-m^2 space that has always been the
social heart of the hotel and one of the hot-
test meeting points in town.
Baranowitz and Kronenberg say that
the concept came quite quickly. Considering
the space’s considerable depth, and variance
in natural light (abundant in in the front,
scant at the back) the designers took inspira-
tion from Barcelona’s natural topography,
which starts at the Mediterranean and sweeps
northwards to the wooded Serra de Collse-
rola. ‘We looked at the space as a passage,’
explains Baranowitz. ‘ A journey, with little
ports of call along the way.’ »
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