Hotel The Exchange – an initiative of Otto Nan and Suzanne Oxenaar – opened in Amsterdam on 3 December 2011. In collaboration with Studio INAMATT and the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, eight students and alumni were selected to design textiles for the hotel rooms in an intensive collaboration with the TextielLab. For her design, Roos Soetekouw turned the mattress inside out.
Devoid of any of the prescriptive conventions of hotel concepts and experiences, Hotel The Exchange weaves together fashion and architecture. True to the spirit of past projects by Nan and Oxenaar – the Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy in Amsterdam and the Llove Hotel in Tokyo – Hotel The Exchange offers something completely different. Nan and Oxenaar’s concept of a ‘hotel with rooms dressed as models’ allows each room to be treated with the same independence as a human model.
They created designs using fashion metaphors. Before ‘dressing up’ began, fabric designs took shape with the guidance of Studio INAMATT. The students and alumni arrived with colour schemes, formal sketches and material samples, which were translated into textiles. Soetekouw took the mattress as her inspiration and turned it inside out, dissecting it into its essential parts and then looking for the beauty and strength of the materials.
Soetekouw’s desire to literally get inside the mattress led her to develop a Gobelin- or damask-like fabric, in which she upholstered another room using a meticulous traditional lathing technique. The precious fabric was custom-woven in two different colour schemes, using an experimental mix of yarns that included paper, viscose, cotton, mohair and gold Lurex.
Soetekouw studied textile design at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute. The project for Hotel The Exchange was one of her first commissions after graduating in 2010. She has since produced several collections and worked for clients including Australian Foodwear and Koda Amsterdam. Her designs reflect her curiosity about life and her ability to look at it from a unique perspective.
