Linz’s Red Star: The Spitz Hotel
The new Spitz Hotel, the first designer hotel in Linz, exudes a very special “spirit of Linz.” Linz09 recently sat down for a chat with Director Regine Wölger.
“We’ve designed our interior appointments especially with Linz 2009 in mind and in consultation with Artistic Director Martin Heller,” said Regine Wölger, the director of the new Spitz Hotel. Set almost unobtrusively behind the massive, overpowering architecture of the Neues Rathaus municipal complex in the Alturfahr district, the structure exudes what Wölger refers to as the “spirit of Linz”—of the other Linz, needless to say, the spirit of the urban cultural center that is steadily displacing the image of the iron-and-steel industry town.After all, image plays quite an important role for the director, who has developed the city’s first designer hotel in collaboration with artist/architect Isa Stein. Step by step, Wölger & Stein worked out the realization of their ambitious plans to incorporate art and culture into a hotel’s infrastructure. Andreas Thaler designed the desks; the lighting is by Ernst Mitterndorfer. “Nothing here is run-of-the-mill. We had everything custom-made,” the director noted with reference to her “internationally unique project.”
Indeed, there are various hotels in Austria and abroad that operate with art and design. But designing each of the hotel’s seven floors and all of the rooms’ essential interior décor elements in cooperation with Linz cultural institutions, in their logo colors, and each with a 260x100 cm picture/image on the wall above the bed is an absolutely unprecedented innovation. Each floor is entirely dedicated to one of Linz’s major cultural institutions: the AEC, Brucknerhaus, University of Art, Landesmuseum, Landestheater, Lentos and O.K.
The building, which features 73 guest rooms including studios, apartments, suites and extended-stay rooms, was once part of the operations of the Spitz Company, a major food manufacturer, and served as a warehouse for the firm’s headquarters located next door. On the occasion of the company’s 150th anniversary 20 years ago, the facility was expanded and converted into a hotel at a cost of 5 million euros. A night’s stay costs between 120 and 250 euros. “Per room, not per person,” Regine Wölger emphasizes, thereby breaking with another conventional way of doing things in the Austrian hospitality industry.
The Spitz Hotel’s target audience is correspondingly diverse. “We want to acquaint all of our travelers with what’s going on artistically in Linz,” Wölger explained. She formulated the reciprocal effects of inspiration and relaxation that they aim to achieve in these terms: “Our guests should be able to say: Even if we weren’t in the Lentos, then at least we were on the Lentos floor.” And at the conclusion of their stay, each guest receives a bath sponge—of course, one in the shape of the red star that’s a spin-off of the old company logo and is now used as a catchy signature motif throughout the Spitz Hotel.
www.spitzhotel.at
