Universal Design Jetsam Hotel Dun Laoghaire

This was an especially challenging task - to design the interior space of an existing contemporary building, as a 4 star hotel over five floors. The Port of Dun Laoghaire,its maritime history, its lightships and the organic and industrial debris washed up on its seashore provided inspiration for my design of the Jetsam Hotel. The Concrete piers, the granite upright stones on the promenade,the lichen and seaweed interspersed reappear in abstracted form in the forms,textures and materials I chose for Jetsam. I adapted and repeated a seaweed motif etched in glass as a screen separating a raised seating area in my restaurant Kish Dish. The stacked dinghys in Coal Harbour offered sinouus shapes to create a voided atrium and reception desk, while the elegant masts provided inspiration for my lighting installation which rises from the ground floor reception area through the atrium to the hotel lounge bar above. My concept in appropriating the rich textures and forms of the shore in Dun Laoghaire aims to marry an industrial ambience which respects the modernist tructure of the building with a luxurious modern, pared-back aesthetic that is as individual as its location.