[ L/B ] Everland

When artists design hotel rooms their focus is very different from that of the architect. Their curiosity, visions, objectives and their implementation are influenced by other factors than architectural ones. The coherence of the whole (the priority of art) is of central importance. As a result there are no reservations that perhaps too much is being expected of the hotel guests.

The Swiss artist duo L/B (Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann) created the Hotel Everland for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02. Executed with a craftsmanship that is devoted to details, the hotel provides a unique experience combined with premium service. In their work L/B try to bring together art and everyday experience as closely as possible. In the final analysis it is the artistic strategy which makes the difference.

Although there are safety regulations which have to be met, the artistic hotel room is something which is far removed from everyday life and might not even function in a situation where a large number of rooms have to be combined. In contrast to modernist utopias, the creators of this project have given up the attempt to create a unity between the two: «Art can never really be everyday experience. That would be like squaring the circle! However that still doesn't stop us from making the attempt nevertheless. We have always had the ambition to break down barriers.»

Hotel Everland is designed down to the last detail including the handles on the windows, and all the components are carefully matched in order to provide a kind of artistic fiction. For both artists this is the core of their project: «At the economic level a hotel room is an absurd idea. Guests should therefore realise that here a kind of ideal hotel room has been created from A to Z. It was our intention to design an integrated whole in which - by our standards - guests would find everything that the heart desires. Every detail was treated by us with the same importance and designed accordingly. The whole is a highly subjective statement which we hope will please people, rouse their enthusiasm and perhaps even stimulate them to dream.»

Originally built in Yverdon, when Expo.02 closed the mobile pavilion was placed on the roof of the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig before moving to its current location at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Like all the other works of art exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Everland is open to visitors every day except Mondays, but from six in the evening only hotel guests are allowed to enter.

A trip to Everland will only be possible until the spring of 2009. Every day a new room becomes available for bookings at an unspecified time, the bookings can only be made online. The price per person per night is 333 euros from Tuesday to Thursday and 444 euros from Friday to Saturday. To preserve the unique nature of this project it is only possible for guests to book one night's accommodation.