Known simply as Room, Sir Antony Gormley’s monumental sculpture is both an interactive artwork and a luxury suite at London’s new Beaumont hotel. It’s a daring undertaking both for the artist, who has never created an enclosed, functional composition with a real living space inside, and the hotel, which is owned by the restaurateurs and first time hoteliers, Corbin & King.
Room, a habitable sculpture, by the widely acclaimed and provocative English Turner prize-winning artist, Antony Gormley, looms like a powerful robot clad in a shell of steel that’s standing sentry from The Beaumont hotel’s Art Deco façade. Originally a garage, converted for the project by architects ReardonSmith, even its interior space is worlds apart from the plush luxury hotel. Sparsely decorated and dark, with a living room lined with Gormley’s sketches and a white marbled bathroom from which you access a narrow staircase that leads up into the bedroom, it actually claims to be the ultimate hospitality experience, one in which you can be enclosed in a total blackout area designed with dark fumed oak, especially created for this meditative mindset. “I wanted the room to be both in the city but absolutely removed from it,” Gormley explains, “to give a feeling of enclosure within and exposure without.”
By flipping the usual proportions of a hotel suite – the floor area is only four square metres, while the ceiling height is ten, the design is supposed to play with visitors’ perceptions of intimacy and space in a fundamental inversion of norms. Gormley says the radical layout and purposefully low light levels inside the room allow him “to sculpt darkness itself,” explaining that the concept was intended to offer, “a safe haven, a retreat, a place of peace, with a feeling of being fully enclosed but not cut off from outside.” He achieves this through fine-tuned details, such as the window being set high above the bed to allow a view of the sky without urban interruptions crossing the line of sight.
