Hotel La Réserve in Knokke, at the coast of Belgium, is a household name in Belgium with a long history of accommodating royal families and renowned artists. In 2011, the hotel reopened following a four-year closure which saw the old wooden structure demolished and a new ultra-modern glass and metal hotel rebuilt. Desso created a flooring plan that provides solutions for both creative as well as functional demands.
The new interior design needed to bring across the majesty and distinction of the older days, but at the same time make a timeless and cosmopolitan impression. Moreover, the challenge was for the new interior design to suit the two different functions of the hotel, which is both a business as well as a family hotel. In practice, this resulted in creative but also in some typical functional demands, of which easy maintenance and acoustics were the most important ones. Design firm Huis Ilse de Meulemeester in Belgium accounted for the interior design and used the nearby North Sea as an inspiration.
The lobby needed to impress with a clean and tight business look. The stone floor that was selected to create this look, didn’t offer the right acoustics in the lobby. Desso provided hand tufted rugs for the seating areas in the lobby, creating the optimal solution for this particular problem. By creating a design that included sea-related colors and seahorses, a touch of the holiday atmosphere was brought into the design to combine the two functions of the hotel.
While the carpet design is unique in every area of the hotel to enhance the particular function of that area, the color palette creates unity. Colors of the sea (bright green and blue for sunny days, but also the greys and blacks of a rainy day) are applied in all areas. The incorporation of the distinguishing logo of the hotel in the carpet in some essential areas like entrances enhances this unifying effect and brings back the majesty of the hotel and its history.
For the guestrooms, the nearby North Sea was again the inspiration for the color palette. Design touches include a carpeted border around each bed and, instead of room numbers on the doors, each number was woven into the carpet and lit by a spotlight above the door.
The hotel is not only adjacent to the sea but sits alongside the Silverlake. This lake provided the inspiration for the ballroom, which was designed with a subtle silver shimmer in the carpet and with silver walls. Four borders similar to those in the guest rooms mark the individual break-out rooms the ballroom can be divided into, once again combining the business function of the hotel with the possibility to host parties for private guests in the complete ballroom.
