Stylt Trampoli compete for the Hotel 50-200 Rooms Award in the International Hotel & Property Awards 2014 with Stora Hotellet Umeå, Sweden.
The Hotel is located in the port town of Umeå, northern Sweden, hard by the Baltic Sea and at the end (and the beginning) of thousands of seafaring routes.
The 82 rooms are divided between six categories, all named for the ideas closest to the sailor’s heart. The master suite is called “Freedom”, which is symbolised by the soaring seagull that features both on the holographic door, and in the wallpaper above the bed, and finally, in the magnificent open-to-the-skies trompe-l’oeil ceiling. The suite, which comprises a huge sitting room, a bedroom, and a double bathroom with its own sauna, occupies a space that was once the hotel’s banqueting hall. The wallpaper replicates the wooden panelling that covered the walls in those days.
There are also four junior suites, called “Passion”, comprising a work area, a table for meals in private and a generous seating area with overstuffed settees and armchairs. Naturally there is also a bedroom and a bathroom with double showers. The “Yearning” category are the family rooms, some of which are fully accessible, and “Mystique” and “Adventure” are the deluxe and standard rooms respectively. All have a wallpaper design featuring the room theme above the bed, a safe with a wooden door carved with the word “Treasures”, and a sumptuous bathroom with custom-designed brass
fixtures.
In the smallest and cosiest rooms, Superstition, sea creatures writhe in the wallpaper, and you sleep in spacious bunk beds. Stylt Trampoli think of these as their sailor’s bunks, but unlike any sailor’s bunk ever, they have bathrooms just as luxuriously outfitted as the other rooms, and splendid top-floor views over the city and the river. Up here is also where you can see another Stylt favourite: the attic staircase, like an avalanche of broken furniture and driftwood coming down through a hole in the ceiling.
Throughout the hotel’s corridors you can see Stylt’s custom-designed wallpaper (full of hidden life) and carpeting featuring octopuses and sea urchins. The images on the doors move and shift as you walk by. In the main stairwell hangs their pride and joy, the three-story tall chandelier made from manilla rope and plexiglass “crystals”, in memory of the original chandeliers that were the largest in town. The cast-iron bannisters from 1895, with their anchors and seahorses, have been lovingly restored. In the lobby, one of the first things you see is the specially designed and built reception disk, of glass and cast iron tentacles. Behind the receptionist a shelf holds a collection of travel memorabilia, books and hats, with a few maritime oddments thrown in.