The third edition of Elle Decor Grand Hotel is here; a project that transforms the Palazzo Morando in Milan, a historic building located in the heart of the fashion district, into a surprising and contemporary urban hotel. An installation open to visitors for three weeks – until October 22 – that reflects on the role of interior design in contemporary culture. In the first edition (2016), the curators were Patricia Urquiola and Piero Lissoni. In 2017, Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel were selected to lead the project. This year is the turn of the prestigious international studio Neri&Hu, based in Shanghai and London.
The exhibition wouldn’t be complete without the LAN collection by Neri & Hu, designed for GAN and presented only a few months ago during the last edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan. LAN redefines the concept of sofa through interchangeable modules that adapt to the space and the needs of the moment. This flexible perspective perfectly exemplifies the philosophy of this exhibition
‘Invisible Rooms by Neri&Hu‘, is inspired by the novel ‘The invisible cities’, by Italo Calvino, and aims at redefining the concept of hotel we currently have. In the same way that Calvino imagined 11 types of fantastic cities that corresponded to human categories such as desire, symbols and passions, among others, Neri&Hu transformed 11 rooms of the Milanese hotel to encourage visitors to think of new possible relationships with space, around the concept of contemporary hotel. “We have chosen to go beyond the traditional and static definition of a hotel as a series of functional elements (corridors, halls, restaurants, rooms) and suggest new possibilities through storytelling,” explain the architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu.
