Hotel MOXY Kaunas Center / Architectural Bureau G.Natkevicius & Partners

Hotel MOXY Kaunas Center / Architectural Bureau G.Natkevicius & Partners

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Text description provided by the architects. Hotel Moxy Kaunas Center, belonging to the international chain Marriott, is the first Moxy hotel in the Baltic States. The main customers are guests – both leisure travelers and young business people – staying at the hotel for 2-3 nights. In order to meet the needs of modern travelers and the fast pace of life, the premises are fully equipped for comfortable work, meetings, and leisure, which allows guests not only to spend a great time but also to work or hold necessary business meetings without even leaving the hotel.

Moxy stands out for its vibrant environment, style, and comfortable simplicity. The 24-hour cocktail bar is also a part of the hotel reception, the closets in the rooms have been replaced by metal openwork constructions with various functions adapted to the needs of guests – hangers, folding work desk, mobile lamp, and illuminated mirror.

The main architectural idea of the building was dictated by the interwar architecture in the surrounding area, characterized by massive plastered volumes, a stable rhythm of openings, and the decor of organic elements. The building has found a dialogue with Kaunas interwar modernism – it is not connected to neighboring buildings along the perimeter, it is retracted, and the outer walls are rounded.

The first floor is glassy, like an extension of the street. And what is above it is an example of clear, rough architecture. Inspiration of the semitonic buildings is reflected in the volume of the new building by stylistically replicating some of the architectural heritage of Kaunas city characteristic features, such as rounded facades, rhythmically expressive decorative pilasters, and a floating cantilever above the ground floor, and a coarse texture plaster with a unique hand-made pattern.

This plaster is not classic, it has a stroke and a hint of old buildings. Plaster has scalability and roughness. By illuminating it, it can be seen that the stroke was made not by machine, but by hand. The internal interfaces with the external architecture can be seen in the strict lines, the structural elements that the project interior design team tried to keep open everywhere. The clean, rough open concrete and metal materials were visually softened by combining colored furniture, textiles, and carpets.

The exterior details were perfectly complemented by a modern and lively interior, distinguished by non-standard compositions of natural raw materials (concrete, black and rustic metal, leather and wood), handmade lamps, large-scale photos, and unique graffiti created exclusively for this hotel. To avoid the usual formality of the hotel market public spaces promising new experiences are decorated with encrypted Kaunas signs and symbols, such as the Bison figure, the motifs of the old city sign, and the specific expressions understood only by locals – all of which stimulate interest, informal communication and provoke smiles of foreign travelers as well as local guests.