Hotel Sotelia

Slovenia offers great potential for spa and thermal bath architecture. Unfortunately, Hotel Sotelia represents one of the few good examples, while most hotels boast glitz and kitsch. Located between two existing hotels, Sotelia clearly distances itself from the built environment and connects, instead, with its natural surroundings. Dean Lah & Milan Tomac's primary concern was to avoid an immense building mass, like the one suggested in the client's brief, which would have blocked the last remaining view of the forest. And so they broke that unit up into small units arranged in landscape-hugging tiers. As a result, the four-storey, 145-room building appears much lower and smaller than this description would suggest. Inside the hotel, although the interior does not trumpet 'architect-designed', many elements, like the bamboo-encased columns, were in fact designed by the architects. And it is these columns - tree trunks by day and pillars of light by night - that attract the traveller.