The client wished to transform an existing tower hotel on a wooded coastal site into a highly sustainable 'music-themed' hotel. The existing nine-storey concrete hotel block is stripped back to its frame, extended and re-clad with a new highly insulated outer skin including an external framework containing balconies and sliding timber louvres. This slashes energy use and prevents summer overheating while giving each bedroom an external space providing a connection to the surrounding forest, changing the character of the existing building.

The new public facilities are grouped around a partially enclosed ground floor courtyard planted as a meadow within a forest clearing. The complex is characterised as a single-storey group of simple white masonry volumes. providing acoustically separable performance spaces. A family of vertical timber framed glazed elements gives visual connections across the courtyard and makes the interiors feel like being between the surrounding birch tree trunks. New public spaces including the conference /performance rooms are naturally ventilated while maintaining acoustic isolation via underfloor labyrinth air intakes and stack ventilators.