Hôtel Droog
The singular guest room.
Netherlands-based Droog is a design company that’s been, at various times, a store, a consultancy, and an all-purpose think tank for new ideas in interiors, furniture, and more. In just the last few months, the group has become something else as well: a hotelier. Their longtime Amsterdam headquarters expanded this past fall into a sequence of adjacent spaces, billed jointly as Hôtel Droog, that include a whimsical courtyard (by French designers Claude Pasquer and Corrine Détroyat), a café serving superlative coffee and treats, and several likeminded fashion and lifestyle retailers, among them Dutch product maker Weltevree and Dutch clothier Kabinet.
The courtyard designed by Claude Pasquer and Corrine Détroyat.
The new neighbours are a welcome addition to the Droog family; but they were not, as it happens, the intended tenants. The original scheme, thwarted by an assortment of bureaucratic obstacles, was to have been an on-site Droog-branded boutique hotel—and part of that original plan survives as a single room above the new complex that’s available for brief stays to visitors prepared to book well in advance online. The sole unit, richly appointed in contemporary designer goodies, is hardly a conventional hotel. “It is both a hospitality experience and a conceptual one,” says Droog’s content and project manager, Agata Jaworska.
The Droog team views its “hotel” as inseparable from the warren of stores below: as Jaworska puts its, “A hotel is a place that you normally only sleep in, and maybe eat a meal. Here you can also come for events, for exhibitions, for fashion, for beauty, for the garden—and of course, also to sleep.”
Photos by Thijs Wolzak.
