Client: The Kash Group

Location: New York, NY, United States

Completion date: 2014

Project Team

Interior Designer

Lilian Bakhash

Lilian B Interiors

Artist

William Engel

William Engel

Overview

The design of the William hotel was an intimate collaboration between artists and designers who wanted to blur the lines between art, architecture, and interior design. Paintings were commissioned for the corridors on each of the five floors in distinct color fields – blue, teal, pink, green and orange. The abstract forms of the paintings were translated into rooms where guests could fully experience color.

Goals

Our primary goal was to make the boundaries of "the art" and the "room" indistinguishable. The experience begins in the corridors where the colors of the paintings insinuate themselves onto the ceilings and walls. In the guest rooms, color is layered on planes, niches and floating walls. Conceptually speaking the paint has been delaminated from the canvas and used to create space from color. Coaxed from "chromatic black", color emerges onto the room's surfaces, bed linens, carpets, and furniture in varying degrees of vibrancy and saturation. By avoiding the aesthetics of minimalism and good taste, and exploring color like painters, our secondary goal was to reach past fashion and personal likes and into the depths of what unapologetic color can mean. Staging fresh juxtapositions, sometimes complimentary and other times dissonant, invites an emotional response and is kind of theatre. The color is not decorative. It is visceral and fully immersive.

Process

Unlike the usual design sequence that ends in the acquisition of art, the artist executed his 'pour' style paintings in a studio shared by the design team at the very beginning of the process. Vibrant colored paints shared layout space with like swatches of fabric and materials, while plans were being drawn in a dynamic and catalytic process. As the paintings materialized so did the rooms and as the rooms evolved, so did the paintings. The art was both generative and responsive and not a decorative afterthought. Working together atelier style, the team literally lived and breathed the colors now on the walls and of the rooms at the William.