Unlike most other hotels, a room in a love hotel is not dedicated to rest and comfort, but serves to inspire and stimulate its energetic visitors. A love hotel only accepts its guests in pairs. Once inside, you are quite alone together.

A love hotel differs from a normal hotel on two counts. Its rooms are rented per time-unit rather than per night, and utter discretion is the name of the game. To guarantee the anonymity of the guests it is essential that circulation is suitably separated. This means that guests leave the building by a different route than the one they entered by, and the hotel service has its own separate circuit. The design focuses most on the conditions necessary to the rooms' functioning rather than how those rooms are designed and furnished.

To make entry (to the hotel) as smooth and discreet as possible, the building is accessible by car only. The familiar blue traffic signage shows the way from the city to the hotel drive.

The design constructs two contained volumes, one below ground level, the other commencing at +4.50 metres above ground level. A drive runs between the two volumes, leading to the one below ground containing parking and changing rooms. As there is parking space for forty cars, forty is the maximum number of couples simultaneously making their way through the building. The upper volume is primed to receive the hotel rooms and service, with a floor every 30 cm from a height of +5.40 up to +16.20 metres. This gives a total of 37 floors, two more than in the Rembrandt Tower, Amsterdam's tallest building. The floors are so related as to create what amounts to a pair of gigantic spiral staircases whose beginnings and ends are joined, generating a continuous circuit.

Between these floors are the rooms. There are no corridors, so that as in Palladio's villas one moves around by stepping from one room into the next. No two rooms are the same. Visitors themselves decide which room is for them. From that moment the room is sealed off and set apart from the volume as a whole.

The entrance and way out are discovered at two different places in the upper volume. Visitors enter the volume by a lift, operated by the central computer, that spirals up to the required floor level. The way out is an autonomous volume twisting its way à la Lebbeus Woods through the structure of rooms, bringing visitors to the right lift for descending to the parking zone. Subtracting the hotel rooms from the total upper volume leaves just the service structure. The service spaces manned day and night are on the first floor of the building (at +4.80m), the others are scattered about the building. As in the film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, these rooms combine a servant function with a leading role.

Place of education: TU Eindhoven
Tutors: Bert Dirrix, Gerard van Zeijl & Ton Venhoeven
Specialization: architecture.