Greenpark Hotel by Khosla Associates

Green Park is a legacy hospitality brand in South India running successful business hotels in Hyderabad, Chennai and Visakhapatnam. Our mandate was to increase the design quotient of the brand in their upcoming Bengaluru hotel. Our clients had inherited an empty building shell suited for a hotel design, and our brief was to design the interiors of a 160 key hotel. Spaces in Phase 1 to be designed were the lobby, an all-day dining restaurant, standard and club rooms, and banqueting facilities. Phase 2 would comprise a rooftop speciality restaurant, pool deck and bar. The hotel is located in south Bengaluru’s JP Nagar, a prime residential area now dotted with a variety of swish restaurants and brewpubs. The hotel is slated to open for business in February 2023.

 

Our clients approached us with an ‘India Modern’ theme in their brief but rather than take a cliched direction to ‘India Modern’, we questioned the very core of what the term means in todays’ context. We therefore chose to explore and celebrate the immense talent of contemporary design studios across the country, working on contemporary products and furniture that explore local material and craft. There are pieces with Bone inlay work from Jodhpur, wood marquetry from Mysore, lacquerware from Channapatna, textiles and cane from Nagaland, carpet making from Mirzapur, papier mache from Kashmir to name a few.

 

There was an opportunity for us in this hotel to think ‘local’ in terms of materiality, furniture and accessories as we were keen on reducing our carbon footprint in the design and construction process as far as possible. The fitout of All 160 rooms in the hotel have been done in a local carpentry and metal workshop just a few kilometres from the site. Rather than a bulk of hotel orders and sourcing from China, (which seems to be a norm in business hotels), all carpentry and metalwork fitout throughout the hotel were from Local Bengaluru factories/vendors. All sanitary and electrical fixtures in the hotel as well as every piece of furniture, accessory and artwork was sourced from India. I believe that this was a simple yet important choice to make in being sustainable. 

 

The design aesthetic in the hotel is mid-century modern, fresh in its appeal with a white shell as a base and pops of colour and texture. We were keen to showcase the work of a variety of design studios across India through a curated approach. Some pieces were collaborations custom designed for the space and others were bought out items. Our idea was to have an open-source design directory/brochure in the lobby for all the curated products on display, for any visitor to the hotel to know where they could be sourced from.

 

The most arresting element as one enters the hotel is a voluminous vaulted roof that runs 130ft in length and 30ft in height along the linear north periphery of the lobby. The vault is shingled in layers of plywood and was conceived by us and crafted in collaboration with local Bangalore studio SFA works. The vault acts as a strong visual connector running between the lobby and restaurant and is the most prominent unifying element between the spaces, flanked by double height windows that admit natural light and connect the indoors to outdoors. Running perpendicular to the vault is another linear axis leading from the entrance and culminating in a 14ft long fluid reception unit clad entirely in brushed brass and Banswara marble. The reception unit sensuously floats ahead of a large bookshelf composed of walnut wood and polished cement. The shelves are peppered with carefully chosen objects from across the country; sculpture, framed graphic art and India inspired books. Clusters of mid-century seating on either side of this axis provide comfortable areas for pause. The overall ambience is expansive as the visitor flows through sheets of white terrazzo flooring, broken only by the rhythm of hand polished cement columns and the playful criss cross of custom designed pendant lamps . The same vocabulary extends into the All-day dining restaurant with the addition of gentle cane partitions and two dramatic biophilia walls serving as the backdrop for the booth seating; metal racks with terracotta planters house a variety of indoor plants thus bringing the outdoors-in and reinforcing the brand language of Greenpark. 

Unique collaborations: At one end of the lobby, graphic designer Tania Singh Khosla created a delightful 18ft high hand tufted wall rug inspired by the KR flower market in Bengaluru. Drawing from a cubist rug, the carpet juxtaposes elements from maps, architectural details of city market and a dramatic top view of the flower-sellers with their circular baskets of brightly coloured marigold and jasmine garlands. The rug was manufactured in Mirzapur by Jaipur rugs. The communal table ahead of the rug was created in collaboration with Vayam Collective, who worked with toy manufacturers in Channapatna to create the clusters of colourful turned wood lacquerware legs to support the fluid shaped walnut tabletop.

 

In the rooms the mid-century language and color scheme continues. A lot of thought was invested in re-looking at the essentials of a business hotel room. We thus did away with closed cupboards favouring an open cupboard scheme, did eliminated a standard desk and chair and introduced a sofa and work table instead. The rooms were brought alive by contextual artwork by TSK Design who did a complete rebrand of Greenpark hotels.The bold and versatile branding picks up on the recurring circular forms in the architecture and interior elements. Circular graphic artworks extend the theme of the flower market- where malipus and marigolds reappear as embellish on the hairdo’s of women.

 

The Banquet halls have a blue and aqua color scheme. A mid century graphic carpet was created by us to offset oak finished walls with vertical inserts of padded blue chenille. The ceiling has a playful array of half cut domes inserts that are painted a matt gold and emanate a gentle glow.