Czech in: a Prague hotel testifies to the architects' pleasure in spare use of materials, and their respect for craft traditions.

Andel's is a hotel in Prague, with an interior designed with opulent severity by Jestico + Whiles. The building is part of a larger mixed development built in the city's Smichov district. Once run-down, the area is being regenerated and the development, which includes a multiplex cinema (also by Jestico + Whiles), shops and offices, connects Radlicka Street to the west of the river Vlatav, and to Jean Nouvel's new Zlaty Andel complex and Andel metro station.

Jetico + Whiles have been involved in designing hotels before -- One Aldwych, The Strand, and The Hempel, Bayswater, are both in London. But in each case, the architects' commission stopped short of completing the interiors. One Aldwych was furnished by an interior designer, and the practice was responsible only for The Hempel's shell. In Prague, the practice designed the hotel's interior down to the furniture and fittings, devising a clear logical plan and sustaining an austerely elegant design that acknowledges the Bohemian context and works visually and functionally. In different ways, both the previous hotels lost something in the final execution of their interiors.

Andel's has 280 bedrooms, conference facilities and a restaurant for 200 people on the first floor, and a ground floor bar. From the street you pass through an etched glass door into a large hall. This is a simply conceived space depending for drama on immense expanses of pale stone and flashes of brilliant colour. The floor is paved with slabs of limestone; and walls, lined with textured stone, have niches carved out of the surface, coloured scarlet and pink. A translucent curtain defines seating areas. When drawn and seen from the outside, the curtain becomes a screen animated by shadows of those within.

Throughout the design there is a constant interplay between materials, colours and textures; between the density of materials such as stone and slate and the insubstantial. The reception desk, which is a heavy monolithic block of stone set with writing blocks of stacked glass, seems to hover on a cushion of light; while the architects' reinterpretation of the grand staircase appears weightless, with wide stone treads enclosed by slender balustrading and diaphanous etched glass walls.

References to Bohemian metalworking and glass traditions appear here and there. The great spiralling lamp, lighting the ground floor cafe, is made of copper as are the intricate mesh cupboards of the cloakroom upstairs. Lifts are surrounded by glowing glass; and luminous white glass boxes are inset into the bar's polished stone counter in the ground floor cafe. Behind the counter a wall of dark coursed slate is incised with a slot lined with blood red glass. Upstairs, etched glass light wells diffuse luminance into the restaurant and glazed screens enclose private rooms. Use of glass reaches an apogee in design of a Crystal Room pushed out over the street at first floor level and reached by a glass bridge. Here, under a back-lit mirrored ceiling, the impression is of being inside a faceted gem.

Furniture and fittings are sparely designed and elegant. In light airy bedrooms, furniture of polished lacquer and glass is (to some extent) flexible. A desk, composed of a sheet of glass, can be rotated on a cabinet to become a dressing table under a wall-mounted mirror. A chaise longue is accompanied by a cube that can be a footrest, a table or seating extension. Bathrooms are lined with stone, with lavatories and showers in separate enclosures contained by frameless glass doors and lined by a wall of flame coloured glass.

Conference facilities have adjustable lighting, proper acoustics, projection screens and technical equipment, and comfortable seating. The main space can be subdivided by sliding creamy leather panels.

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Architect

Jestico + Whiles, London

Project architect

David Perera. Sean Clifton, Tony Ingram, Johanna Scockhammer, Jackie Coburn, Gayle Hanley, David Whitehead, Paul Miller 

Architects for the shell

Satra Picek Architects

Photographs

Ales Jungmann

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Ground floor lobby and reception: monolithic reception desk with writing tablets of stacked glass.

3

Ground floor bar. Slate wall and Stone bar Inset with glowing cubes.

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Ground floor bar. Suspended spiralling copper lamp referring to Bohemian metalwork traditions.

5

Architects' reinterpretation of grand staircase between slender balustrading and glass walls. Left, light framed lifts.

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Bedroom furniture by the practice.

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First floor dining room illuminated by glass lightwell.

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Private dining room on first floor enclosed by sliding glass screens.