Innsbruck’s First Design Hotel
City hotel “The PENZ”
Individual comfort, welcoming spaces, fantastic views, and an enriching meeting place in the heart of the city: “The PENZ” offers high-end hospitality with a special experience – that is equally attractive to both guests and locals.
During the course of the reconstruction of Innsbruck’s City Hall, we were commissioned, together with Jiszda & Partner, to provide the interior design of the four-star business hotel in the complex in line with a competition winning proposal: As Innsbruck’s first design hotel, the intention behind “The PENZ” was to create a new architectural and urban design highpoint in the city. In order to provide an atmospheric counterpoint to the technically cool architectural language of Innsbruck City Hall and the bustle of the RathausGalerien, our design for the elegant interiors paid particular attention to the creation of a balanced interaction between colors, materials, and lighting effects.
Dark wood, elegant stone, and anthracite-gray metal lend the spaces precisely that sense of calm that is demanded by the delicate structure of the building volume. Short-lived aesthetic games and formalistic design elements were rejected in favor of a reduced but well-thought-out overall concept.
Markus Moll
Architect in Innsbruck
Lighting as a generator of atmosphere
Light is used as a creative design element in order to influence the perception of space and time and to offer the guest a unique experience. This is done by means of a computer-supported artificial lighting concept – from the atmospheric “light port” at the entrance to the individually controllable lighting in the rooms.
Natural daylight floods many of the hotel’s rooms and this was also taken into account in the design of the artificial lighting. We developed a flexible lighting system that controls the basic lighting mood in line with the time of day and year as well as the weather.
Markus Moll
Architect in Innsbruck
Individually adjustable
The 96 differently designed rooms offer guests maximum functional flexibility: Vertically adjustable glass tables, moveable flat screens, or tiny details such as an intelligent storage system in the bathrooms enhance the guest’s personal comfort while enabling them to individually adjust the windows and the solar protection.
Highlight on top
The rooms on the first four levels are reached via two panoramic lifts with a direct view of the Nordkette mountain range. The American Bar “5th Floor” is the crowning glory: With its panorama terrace and variable spatial solutions it opens up breathtaking views of the mountains of the Inntal.
The new meeting spot in the heart of the city
The hotel plays a key urban planning role in the overall concept of Innsbruck’s City Hall complex. The decision to project the building into Adolf-Pichler-Platz, which was driven by ATP, enabled the shop passage to continue to Marktgraben and, by doing so, prevented the RathausGalerien from becoming a dead-end. This urban planning decision not only increased footfall but also ensured that the hotel became a dynamic meeting place for both business travelers and the people of the city.
