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Faena Hotel + Universe
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Faena Hotel & Universe, Philippe Starck's latest hotel creation for Argentine fashion designer Alan Faena is a high octane blockbuster of a project on a staggering scale. A unique experience and only a stones throw from the city’s main attractions. Faena Hotel & Universe is located in the fashionable port area of Puerto Madero in the heart of Buenos Aires. Spearheading the Buenos Aires cultural renaissance is Alan Faena, a former fashion designer who enrolled Philippe Starck to create a hotel that is more than just a chic place to kip but the epicentre for the capital's A-listers, creatives and decision makers. And it's making big waves south of the Equator since there is really nothing like it on the Latin American continent. Sao Paulo's slick Unique and Fasano hotels are notable exceptions, but they are not as ambitious or as symbolic as Faena Hotel + Universe. Frank Gehry single-handedly put Bilbao on the global art and architecture route in 1997, a formerly fusty Spanish backwater, with his Guggenheim. More recently Swiss design team Herzog and de Meuron have replicated their success with Tate Modern by putting the ever so slightly kooky city of San Francisco back on the design map with the building of the de Young museum. Starck and Faena's totemic project, which opened at the beginning of 2005, is in the same league in terms of channeling the creative energy of a city in one high octane blockbuster project.
It comprises 83 hotel rooms and 85 privately owned apartments - this is Starck's first residential project in South America - and a public area (the Universe bit), a playground for beautiful Portenos, which consists of an exhibition space, restaurant, tango club, spectacular outdoor pool and a gym/spa/hamam with Turkish baths. The hotel is monumental in its scope but still has the boutique ethos running through its veins. Surrounded by rough and ready warehouses in the gentrified docklands area, Puerto Madero, from the outside it looks like the grain silo it used to be back in the day. Once through the hallowed portals, though, and into the cathedral like lobby it's a five star experience all the way (the ubiquitous 'F' emblazoned throughout trumpets the man's grand vision). A towering black caped concierge greets you on arrival before you are assigned a lifestyle or experience manager who is at your beck and call for the entirety of your stay. Need fast track entry into the hottest restaurant or club in town? They'll sort it. The decor throughout is mind boggling, combining the drama of the old building with a mix of Starck's new designs and antiques picked up at local markets and auctions. The rooms all have views of either the docks or the river and are furnished with signature Starck white-upholstered beds, sofas with golden-clawed feet, flat-screen home cinema systems and glass-encased bathrooms with marble floors. It's all very lavish. Elsewhere, red eyed unicorns, chairs shaped like golden swans, velvet curtains, crystal chandeliers and rococo flourishes are employed - it's film set stuff, and in keeping with the whimsy of Starck's former projects, including the St Martin's Lane in London, with its Alice in Wonderland frippery. But the indigenous references here set Faena apart. The main drawing room, for example, is designed to re create the feeling of a library in a rural Argentinean lodge with old fashioned leather sofas, while El Mercado, the main restaurant, is an eclectic combination of hardwood flooring, aluminium-tiled ceiling from demolitions of original Belle Epoque buildings, red leather and gold-leafed imperial style chairs, long wooden tables and glass cases filled with antiques from the nearby antique mecca San Telmo. Portraits and photographs of famous Argentineans of the past and present are placed throughout and include everyone from Eva Peron and Che Guevara to Jorge Luis Borges. You never forget which city you are in. The focus for the hotel is the swimming pool. Most hotels with an eye on style boast about having 'model types' as guests. At Faena, you actually have real live models splashing about in the pool.
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