We are not talking about Spier Hotel when we say Hotel rooms are often viewed as impersonal and transient spaces. William Hurt's travel-weary character in the film 'The Accidental Tourist' muses at one point: I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals... I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?'
The new international trend in art hotel rooms contends this. Guests can now literally live and be submerged in their favourite artist's work by sleeping inside their art. The outcome is an intensely personalized experience where each room is completely exclusive and reflects the artist's unique vision.
In an attempt to offer guests a richer and more intimate stay and experience of South African art, the Village at Spier Hotel recently commissioned six celebrated contemporary South African artists to each transform a room into a fully functional work of art. Artists were briefed on structural and safety concerns and then let loose in one of the hotel's rooms. The end results are at once zany, thought-provoking and inspiring.
Conceptual artist, Matthew Hindley, filled his room with empty picture frames, a digital camera and printer. Guests can take portraits of each other and then fill an empty picture frame with their photographs. Eventually the stark, impersonal walls will be covered with photographs of previous guests and the room will be awash with traces of previous visitors; chronicling memories and telling an interesting array of visual stories about everyone who have stayed there.
Room 603 is the Red Room. The artist, Kim Lieberman, has been preoccupied with the colour red for quite some time. For her, red is the colour of blood (and a symbol of life). Room 603 is painted a deep red and adorned with stylized traced portraits of various people. The silk-velvet red bedspread leaves a mark when someone lies on it - the idea is that the bedspread will become increasingly traced with marks over time - a map, (or log) that records the bodies of everyone who have stayed in the room (alluding to the residue and impact every action leave behind). Mosaics adorn the walls in the bathroom and plastic red soldiers march up the walls. A rubber bath duck quacks silently in one corner.
Room 503, the voyeur room, gives guests the opportunity to "explore and eavesdrop into the private world of a stranger". Jo O'Connor used her alter ego to personalize her room and blur the boundaries between public and private. O'Connor plays with the idea that hotel rooms are blank public spaces, hired out to guests to temporarily make their own. This room is not a blank canvass at all. Personal photographs decorate the walls, books line the shelves and a fascinating array of other personal effects are scattered throughout the room. Guests have the opportunity to indulge their voyeuristic and inquisitive tendencies and construct their own stories around what the 'owner' of the room is like.
Mustafa Maluka transformed his hotel room into a brightly patterned glow-in-the-dark extravaganza. Maluka employed the same patterned painterly language - evident in the backgrounds of his iconic portraiture - to transform the walls of his room into a whimsical technicolour wonderland.
The trendy Craft room is a stylishly designed interior (facilitated by the Cape Craft Design Institute and the Old Mutual Foundation) decorated with various functional and decorative items. Eighteen master crafters from diverse backgrounds and mediums were briefed to design and make items, inspired by Cape Town's iconic pre-apartheid, Art Deco Mutual Heights Building. A handy addition to the room is a craft map of Cape Town (marked with all the places you can buy the various products displayed in the room).
Unfortunately Nicholas Schlovo's room had not been completed when this article went to press. CapeTownMagazine.com promises to keep you posted on what this renowned sculptor will cook up.
Whether you're an art lover; a traveler seeking a unique and intimate experience; or - like William Hurt's character in 'The Accidental Traveller' - tired of bland and impersonal hotel rooms; a stay in one of Spier's new art rooms is a unique and impressionable experience.
Molo says: "Contact CapeTownMagazine.com for more information on the Village at Spier Hotel's new art rooms. Read more about the
Village at Spier; Spier's restaurants and
