The Doorstep is a hotel turned inside out.

The workings and functions of the hotel -usually invisible to the city- are brought out into the open. Corridors and facilities are cantilevered from the hotel tower with guest rooms.

The spectacle of the multifarious everyday activities and available services on display draw in a wide array of people -bringing the diversity of the city literally to the guest’s doorstep.

The Premise.

The typical highrise city hotel: a matrix of hermetically sealed, relentlessly repeated identical hotel rooms sitting on top of an inward-looking podium which hides a world of facilities.

We accept the bigger city hotels are like small, dysfunctional villages in their own right. We put forward that these these ever-changing neighbourhoods have not been sufficiently integrated in the fabric of the city.

Think of all the facilities present in hotels. The meeting rooms, swimming pools, laundries; the restaurants, the gyms and squash courts; the convenience stores, concierge services and business centres.

Think also of the dark, uninviting, generic hotel corridor. Think of the wasted opportunities, all these square metres for just circulation, the same depressing stationary conveyor belts all over the world, nightmarish and depressing.

What if we turn the hotel inside out, upside down?

Circulation on the outside of the building, galleries with abundant daylight and spectacular city views.

Facilities not on ground level but lifted up, scattered, part of the newly formed promenade architectural, livening up the walk to your room. Also acting as a living billboard for all the activities available in the hotel.

It’s not about inventing new functions or hybrid spaces where hotel guests and locals can meet. It is about injecting what is already present with new life, opening up the hotel to the city. Making a living, breathing spectacle of the hotel merely by opening it up to the city, visually as well as functionally.

The corridors with a variety of activities and stepped access to the raised hotel rooms call to mind another New York scene, the streetlife around the Stoops, typical of the old Brownstone buildings.

Injecting the diversity and excitement of the city into the hotel.

The typical city hotel room is only differentiated by its size, sometimes its view, sometimes by some extra services. However, the Doorstep is able to offer an endless array of room types, based on their proximity to facilities: the pool room, the smokers’ room, the booklovers’ room, the family with kids’ room, the gym nut’s room, the businessman’s room, the serious drinker’s room, the gambler’s room… And all the combinations thereof.