Hotel Everland on top of the Palais de Tokyo
Wow! What a view from your room on the Eiffel Tower!
From the roof of the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art the one room (one suite) Hotel Everland has moved to the roof of the Paris Palais de Tokyo where it will receive guests for an overnight stay and museum visitors during the day until the end of 2008.
In an interview with the Australian News Com Swiss artists Sabina Lang who with Daniel Baumann forms the duo “L/B” that created the artsy Hotel concept, commented:
“It’s what we thought of as an ideal hotel room,” Ms Lang said as she watched a giant crane being prepared to winch the prefabricated green unit up from the back of a truck.
Hotel Everland, originally conceived for Expo 2002, has already spent 18 months at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig. But the view from the Palais de Tokyo, incorporating the Paris skyline and the Eiffel Tower, is of a different kind from the east German tower block guests saw there.
“You shouldn’t need a television,” Ms Lang said.
She said it was important for the work to be an actual hotel as well as a part of the museum. Guests pay Euro 333.- (currently $526.86) a night during the week and Euro 444.- (currently $702.48) at weekends, a comparable rate to other hotels in the chic 16th arrondissement, with charges used to cover running costs.
Guests book online at the Hotel Everland site but stay only for the night after closure of the museum. During the day, the room can be inspected by museum visitors.
Reservations, which opened at the start of October, have been brisk and the first two months are already booked out. But the two artists have not been tempted to change trades and abandon art for the hospitality industry.
“It’s absurd to have a one-room hotel and it’s never going to be a success as a business plan,” Ms Lang said. “We just like to play around with the idea of exclusivity and luxury.”