Hotel of Stories

A hotel room is a space where a tourist spends only a few days and rarely repeats their stay, which allows for an interior design approach that is scenographic, creating a dramatic and surreal space. Hotel Priča is a small family-run hotel located in Rakov Potok, a place without significant natural or cultural landmarks, where its intangible heritage and the surreal world of stories and fairy tales make it distinctive. The intangible oral tradition ‘materializes’ through spatial elements, with each room embodying a motif or ambiance of mythological legends. The contrast of themes – gloomy, mysterious, and pastoral – has resulted in six completely different rooms and ambiances, transforming the hotel from a mere lodging into an attraction for visitors, each room narrating the stories of its place through its interior design.

The central hallway takes on the role of the narrator. Its design enhances the guest’s disorientation and amazement, seemingly reversing the gravitational roles of the ceiling, floor, and walls, and leads visitors into different worlds within each room.

The Room of Secrets is both completely filled and completely empty – filled with the strong graphics of black-and-white chessboard patterns, yet empty at first glance, as it appears to have no furnishings – the guest themselves form the space, which ultimately results in a fully equipped hotel room. The Fireplace Room uses textures abstracted from a hearth, the Fairy Room achieves an elegiac ambiance by incorporating unexpected exterior elements. The Thrush Room deconstructs elements of a birdcage, the Lamp Room blurs the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional night silhouettes, and the mystique of the Witch Room is achieved through astonishing proportions.

The diversity of the rooms is unified by a visual identity and graphics that complement the spatial elements, functioning as a cohesive whole within the context.

Hotel Priča challenges the conventional pattern of hotel accommodation and the perception of the guest’s role. Typically, a hotel represents a hedonistic paradise catered to a passive guest, but Hotel Priča sets challenges, leaving an intense impression, both visually through abstraction and illusions, and experientially, as if it were a hidden riddle from Wonderland.