If you’re a fan of the W Hotels chain, which at the moment comprises nearly 50 properties in more than 25 countries, you probably fall in to one (or both) of the following categories: you’re young, wealthy, extroverted, and appreciate things like fire-juggling bartenders, or you really, really love design. It’s not that the W’s interiors are suited to every taste — especially since half the fun of them is that they’re mostly designed by different firms, from Patricia Urquiola (Vieques) to Yabu Pushelberg (Guangzhou) — but you do have to tip your hat to any corporate entity that puts this much investment into our little corner of culture, including the annual W Hotels Designers of the Future awards.
The latest W to take cutting-edge design to a novel locale is the new W Verbier by the Amsterdam firm Concrete, which Sight Unseen had the good fortune to visit last month, Verbier being a town in the Swiss Alps known for its brutal slopes and the W Verbier being the hotel brand’s first ski resort. Ironically, I don’t ski, thanks to a traumatizing introduction to the sport in middle school, but I still found plenty to explore — and photograph — during my visit. It was nice to see how Concrete married its normally hyper-slick style to the area’s outdoorsy vernacular architecture, and even nicer to see something even more beautiful than skyscrapers on the horizon all day long.
This post is sponsored by the W Hotels group. Click here to book your own stay at their newest property in Verbier — hopefully you’re a much better skier than the author.
The slopes in Verbier are said to be Switzerland’s most challenging; only the most athletic skiers — and their unfathomably fearless skiing prodigy 3-year-olds — vacation here.
The new W Verbier is set up right at the bottom of one of the resort’s main trails, and comprises three main hotel buildings, a condo residence, and a ski-in outdoor bar.
This, folks, was the view from my room.
The Amsterdam firm Concrete took full advantage of said views, designing the hotel’s main spaces around them, like this amphitheater-style lounge where guests can sip drinks while staring out a towering wall of windows.
The wall of windows.
A pair of Eero Aarnio bubble chairs on the outdoor balcony of a second lounge area, which most of the aprés-ski crowd were bundled up enough to take advantage of.
My favorite recurring pieces in the hotel decor were these neon basket-woven vessels by Marie Michielssen for Serax, which joined other designs by familiar names like Plumen and Bocci.
An example of the aforementioned vernacular architecture. Most of the buildings in Verbier totally looked like this.
Also, vernacular crafts — I spotted these stationed inexplicably outside a convenience store next to one of the ski lifts. Most of the furniture in Verbier, luckily, did *not* look like this.
A giant map of Verbier’s daunting ski pistes, also stationed outside the main ski lift.
Despite being afraid of heights, I found the ride up the mountain in these stylish little gondolas to be not scary at all, partly thanks to my irrational instinct that anything engineered by the Swiss must be foolproof.
I was also distracted by breathtaking sights like this one.
It wasn’t hard to intuit the W’s reasons for opening in Verbier, with its unusually stylish, athletic clientele. I was also told that one of the only other comparable hotels in town was decorated from top to bottom in a teddy bear motif, its owners being obsessive collectors.
One of the best meals I had while in Verbier was at a restaurant near the top of the mountain. I felt slightly nauseous thanks to the elevation (7,000 feet) but still cleaned my plate.
This is what food looks like on top of a mountain in Switzerland. Can you imagine getting something like this in America? Where restaurants rarely put in any more effort than absolutely necessary anytime they’re catering to desperate tourists without access to other alternatives? There were tiny. flowers. on. my. salad. Flowers!
The team behind the W Verbier smartly invested a bunch in the hotel’s spa, where I saw more than a few glamorous people dozing rather unglamorously on the sofas and lounges installed next to this indoor-outdoor swimming pool, exhausted from the day’s runs.
A leather-lined faux-gondola that sits in one of the hotel’s hallways, in which I took many a selfie I’ve refrained from posting here.
Said hallway’s floors, which sported beautiful black veined stone tiles used throughout the project.
The highlight of the trip was probably my helicopter ride over the mountains, courtesy of Heli-Alps, which is normally employed to drop clinically insane people onto ski slopes that are otherwise impossible to reach.
One such slope. I saw a person about to ski one of these all by himself/herself. No comment.
The view of Verbier from the approaching helicopter.
The interesting semi-Brutalist-style structure we exited the helicopter landing pad through, which I liked but heard several people passionately insult on the way out.
A lovely door I spotted while wandering through the main town.
The town featured a surprising amount of retro-style signage. I particularly liked this bizarre font mash-up.
I also liked the many neon signs I spotted, such as this classy marquis atop an equipment rental shop.
A rainbow of local Verbier yogurt on display at a wildly popular gourmet shop, which was filled with stinky cheeses and cured meats. I failed to decipher its elaborate color-coding system.
Another gorgeous gradient, this one part of the decor at the W Verbier’s flagship restaurant Arola, which is helmed by the famed (at least in Europe) Spanish chef Sergi Arola, and which has a sister restaurant in the W Paris-Opera.
The ceiling at Arola — also designed by Concrete — was particularly lovely, covered in giant spun-copper shades hung at random lengths.
The real star of the show, of course was the food — including Arola’s signature patatas bravas pictured here, whose recipe he tweaks based on the tastes endemic to each of his restaurant’s locales. The fried, mayonnaise-y delicacy seemed perfectly suited to a clientele of calorie-starved skiers, that’s for sure; I, unfortunately, had no excuse. And yet, with the chef himself sitting right next to me, I devoured everything put in front of me. I may have left Verbier no better at skiing than when I came, but I certainly didn’t leave hungry.
Someone like JP Williams has enjoyed plenty of validating moments in his 20-year career as a graphic designer: Getting to study under one of his design heros, Paul Rand, at Yale; winning more than 100 awards for projects like his kraft-paper tea packages for Takashimaya; discovering that his collection of baseball cards from 1909 was worth enough to buy his wife and business partner Allison an engagement ring. All well and good, however none of it really compared, he admits, to the feeling of being validated by Martha Stewart.
On occasion, the editors of Sight Unseen spot a story about creativity told from a viewpoint that’s not unlike our own. This one, posted yesterday on the design blog Yatzer, peeks in on the studio of Québec-born, London-based designer Philippe Malouin. Malouin is known for taking his time with a project — after painstaking research, his recent chainmail-like Yachiyo rug for Beirut’s Carwan Gallery famously took 3,000 hours to produce — and in the article, writer Stefania Vourazeri probes the young designer about his thoughts on permanence as well as the influence of art on his designs. "Production for the sake of production is not that interesting to me,” he explains.
And now for some ridiculously old news: At Design Miami/Basel this past June, the three W Hotels Designers of the Future awardees included Tom Foulsham, Markus Kayser, and Philippe Malouin, each of whom were handed a commission with a very meta, very Sight Unseen-style brief — to devise a project that would somehow illuminate their creative process, like Foulsham's merry-go-round propelled by balloons and hair-dryers, or Malouin and Kayser's differing takes on daylight-mimicking lamps. Even if you weren't in Basel yourself, you probably read all about it earlier this summer, whoop-de-doo. But what you might not have seen is the hefty catalog Design Miami's organizers produce for every show, which was handed to us belatedly last week during a pow-wow with head curator Marianne Goebl, and which contained an article that was so up our alley we were surpised no one had shown it to us sooner: a photo essay wherein Kayser, Foulsham, and Malouin were asked to respond to questions like "A sketch" and "An object you find useful" by handing over the sketches and objects themselves.
