Hotel Q!

Berlin’s Hotel Q! is as stylish a space as any of the high-end retail shops around the corner on the Kurfürstendamm — and quite a bit more affordable. Unlike similarly avant-garde hotels in, say, London or Milan, Q! shows that high-design hotel interiors need not demand a premium price.

The design, courtesy of the LA/Berlin-based firm Graft, is ultra-modern and minimal, to be sure. Yet the clichés of the modern design hotel are scrupulously avoided. The palette depends as heavily on deep crimson red and chestnut-brown hardwood as it does on clinical laboratory white, and the now-commonplace glass-walled bath is one-upped by Q’s innovation: in the twelve rooms that have baths, the tubs are sunken into slate-grey terra cotta and built in to wood-paneled consoles attached to the bedside.

Furnishings and flat-screen televisions are built into sloping Kubrick-white walls that curve as they meet ceilings and floors, lending a slightly retro tinge to the high modernism of the décor. And the public spaces are, if anything, even more daring, with organically curving surfaces covered in red linoleum and soft, theatrical lighting. The hotel’s Fox Bar looks like the backdrop for a fashion shoot, with the occasional appearance of a DJ and champagne drink specials somehow reinforcing the effect. There’s an eclectic restaurant that makes use of the hotel’s own herb garden, along with what’s perhaps the most unusual hotel amenity we’ve seen anywhere: the spa’s heated “sand room.” It’s like a beach within the hotel, where guests lounge on chaises (and, presumably, lie back and think of the ocean).