INTRODUCTION
People ask the question in different ways. Is the hotel new? Is it part of a group? Are you planning to expand? Underneath each of them is the same surprise — that a house this size, on this canal, holds so few rooms.
The short answer is that seventeen is what fits. The longer answer involves a staircase, a lobby we decided not to build, and a view of hospitality that is easier to keep at a small scale than a large one. This is the longer answer.
CHAPTER ONE
The staircase decides
Every plan for the house began with more rooms. Twenty-two in the first drawing, and twenty-six in one we would rather forget. Each of them failed in the same place: the staircase. It could be kept, or the rooms could be had, but not both. We kept the staircase, and it left us with seventeen.
CHAPTER TWO
A door, not a lobby
Seventeen turned out to be right for another reason. It is the number of guests a house can know by name. With seventeen rooms there is no lobby, no queue and no desk — one door, and someone behind it who has read your letter. Above that number a hotel starts to need systems. Below it, a hotel can still have manners.
CHAPTER THREE
No two alike
Because the rooms follow the house and not a floor plan, no two of them are the same. One has a canopy bed between gilded columns. One opens its doors onto the water. One has nothing in it but a bed, a lamp and the dark. We did not design seventeen rooms. We found them, and then we left them alone.
The House
2 min read
Why seventeen rooms
We could have built more. This is why we did not.
NEXT IN THE JOURNAL
What the restoration left alone
Three years, and most of them spent deciding what not to touch.