Cool Hunting

Design Hotels Yearbook 2006
For trip-planning or idle fantasizing, Design Hotels Yearbook, the paper counterpart to its online booking service, makes a great traveler's companion. Filled with lush, full-page photos that provide rare glimpses into the interiors of 136 stylish hotels around the globe, each edition includes basic info and features editorial detailing architectural and design elements. With new hotels added every year, it's a great way to...

Lux 11
Lux 11, a new hotel that opened in Berlin's hip Mitte district in July, wins points for a location central to many of the city's best boutiques and restaurants and, with the addition of an Italian-Asian fusion restaurant (slated to open mid-November), Tietgen und Kahlcke's Aveda spa, Ulf Haines' (buyer of the the famed Quartier 206) store, and café, does its own part in...

The Ten Year Hotel
Shipping container mania continues, this time in the form of students Lee Ferguson and Jonathan Whittaker's concept hotel that incorporates the temporality of cityscapes into its design. The 26-room building suspends the containers as self-contained pods within a steel beam grid, enabling both adaptability to changing surroundings and a sunken bar/concert area on the ground floor. via Hotel Chatter...

Hip. Sexy. Chic: Montreal's Hotel Godin
Set at a crossroads between downtown and the hip Plateau neighborhood, in an edifice that straddles old-world charm and modern exuberance, the six-month-young Hotel Godin is the newest boutique hotel to cater to the trendy jet-set crowd in Montreal....

Copenhagen: Hotel Fox
Individually themed rooms is nothing new in the hotel world. Hotel Fox will take that idea to a new level when it opens this April in Copenhagen. The hotel has been transformed by 21 street artists, graphic designers and illustrators from Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Each of the 61 rooms has a unique installation; the works have been commissioned by Die...

Chichu Art Museum
I haven't had the pleasure of traveling to Japan yet, but very soon I'll be going on a cool hunting adventure there-- and I don't know if I'll ever return! One place I must stop as I'm on tour around Japan is The Chichu Art Museum. It's only accessible by boat, and Tadao Ando designed it to be completely built into the ground and...