HOSPITALITY
An exterior view of the Pulitzer Amsterdam. The iconic Dutch hotel has recently been renovated
GOING DUTCH The Pulitzer Amsterdam As the Pulitzer Amsterdam is reborn, its creative director Jacu Strauss tells us how he made sense of the 25 historic buildings that make up the hotel
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outh African designer Jacu Strauss has a bit of a thing for complicated buildings. His first hotel interiors project, the Mondrian London, was housed in Warren Platner’s iconic Sea Containers House building on the river Thames. Strauss was working for Tom Dixon’s Design Research Studio at the time, and acted as a senior designer on the project, which saw the huge office block transformed into a cruise linerinspired hotel with a rooftop bar, restaurant with private dining rooms, cinema and a spa. “It was a complicated project,” says Strauss. “It was quite an unusual building, so it was definitely a challenge. Luckily, I like making my life difficult.”
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Strauss has since left Tom Dixon's Design Research Studio to go it alone, but his latest project, the Pulitzer Amsterdam, is no less challenging. Strauss was asked to act as creative director for the restoration of the five star hotel, which is situated along the Prinsengracht and Keizersgracht canals in central Amsterdam. The project involved restoring and redesigning the 25 interlinked canal house buildings that comprise the hotel. The buildings – which were gradually bought up over the years by Peter Pulitzer (grandson of newspaper magnate and Pulitzer Prize creator Joseph Pulitzer) to create a five star hotel – are more than 400 years old, and are situated in a UNESCO World Heritage
CLAD mag 2016 ISSUE 3