The food and hospitality company founded by chef Nobu Matsuhisa, film producer Meir Teper and Hollywood legend Robert De Niro has officially launched its first European hotel in Shoreditch, London.
The Nobu Hotel Shoreditch, located on Willow Street, features 148 bedrooms, a fine dining restaurant, a cocktail lounge and a fitness centre, all set within a strikingly jagged building created by Ben Adams Architects – developing an original vision conceived by Ron Arad Architects.
The hotel has five stories that are fractured into angular concrete balconies. Combined with cantilevered corten steel beams, these create an apparently frayed edge to the northern façade. Six protruding slab edges penetrate the glazing to accentuate the horizontality of the volume.
The windows are formed of printed, layered glass that is highly reflective; leading to an interplay of colour and light. Finally, a landscaped garden at the site’s eastern edge is articulated into terraces, seating and planting.
“This design marries the raw creative energy of the location with Nobu’s values of simple luxury with a façade that fragments at the eastern end and descends into a welcome new pocket park, overlooked by the warehouses of Great Eastern Street to the North,” said Ben Adams Architects in a design statement.
“Nobu require that all their buildings reflect their immediate context. Our palette of concrete, bronze, timber and glass overlaid with creative textiles and warm fabrics create a simple, considered and raw aesthetic. The building sits happily in Shoreditch among the reworked warehouses and factories that characterise the area.”
The interior spaces, which showcase Nobu’s ‘East meets West’ philosophy, were created by Studio Mica and Studio PCH.
The first Nobu Hotel opened in 2013 within Caesars Palace Las Vegas, followed by the Nobu Hotel City of Dreams Manila in 2014. Several more have since followed, with others planned in Palo Alto, Marbella, Riyadh, Los Cabos, Chicago, Toronto, Bahrain and Barcelona.
