At last: we buid a hotel in Norrmalmstorg square and close down the game...

| Mar 12, 2010 | 0 comments

BrittonBritton contributes image, design and communication for the new Nobis Hotel in our Royal Swedish Capital's most premium square Norrmalmstorg — Stockholm's first contemporary luxury hotel to be opened in December.

Yes indeed that fine Norrmalmstorg square has always been the most expensive spot in the Swedish version of Monopoly, and everyone who has ever played that game knows all too well what happens when you build an hotel in that spot...ah well, the time has come at last!

The past Tuesday we staged the first press sneak preview of Nobis Hotel, the new, grand, contemporary 201-room luxury hotel on Norrmalmstorg square, the most stylish and prestigious sqaure in the dead center of downtown Stockholm which will open in December, owned and managed by our dear old friend Alessandro "Sandro" Catenacci and his The Nobis Group, the owners of Operakällaren (The Opera Celler) and Café Opera, Sweden's most famous restaurant and nightclub respectively, and a number of other distinguished and historic restaurants and hotels in the Stockholm area. BrittonBritton is commissioned with the overall responsibility for the image, graphic design and communication for this new hotel, still a construction site.

Nobis Hotel will be a hotel of a kind hitherto lacking here in Stockholm — a modern and contemporary hotel that will define its own sense of luxury; one that is elegant, sophisticated and extremely comfortable, but also sound, reasonable and morally justifiable, devoid of the opulent excesses of traditional luxury. The hotel is built in two magnificent stone buildings from the late 19th century on the sunny side of Norrmalmstorg (the Acne flagship is housed in one them, the Marimekko ditto in the other), with a sharp contrasting contemporary interior design by our friends Claesson Koivisto Rune. Transforming these culturally strictly protected buildings into a superior standard modern hotel is no mean feat. Construction has been ongoing at top pace for more than a year already. The investment is considerable.

In addition to the 201 rooms — eight of which are suites — Nobis Hotel will boost some 800 plus square meters of public focal points — restaurants, bars and lounges. We are fully convinced that these spaces will form a new formidable center stage in downtown Stockholm where Stockholmers will mingle with visitors from all around the world, 24/7/365.

The large restaurant will be, as it should, Italian (given the ancestry of Sandro Catenacci). It will be named, as it should, Caina. All of us familiar with Stockholm's modern restaurant history remember vividly the classic first version of the restaurant with that name, opened back in 1980 by the at that time merely 21-year old bold and daring restaurant entrepreneur Sandro and his father Vicenzo "Enzo" Catenacci, the great chef, assisted at the stove by the then merely 14-year old Stefano Catenacci, located on the then super oddball adress of Folkungagatan in Södermalm, operated by four generations of the Catenacci family. Some three decades later, the hotel's gastronomic director Stefano Catenacci is now one of Sweden's most famous, celebrated and decorated chefs and the Executive Chef of the Royal Court of Sweden, responsible for this upcoming summer's Royal wedding, no less. He guarantees that Caina in its new guise will be a classic and traditional, truly genuine Italian restaurant of the very highest order — a kind of restaurant that has been missing in this town for all too long alas; ever since the first version of Caina closed down after just three brief, tremendously successful years, as a matter of fact. Moreover, Nobis Hotel will sport a smaller bistro and bar, the 24/7 bistro, where freshly cooked high quality food, as the name indicates, will be served 24 hours, 365 days a year. Also, we'll all be able to convene over stylishly irresistable cocktails in the spectacular, cathedral-resembling lounge — we call it Stockholm's new living room — easily accomodating 200 cocktail drinkers under douple glassed domes some 25 meters high. From the lounge cathedral, you will enter into the smaller, intimate, intense, slightly surreal shrine of the glamorous Golden Bar.

You who have followed this website will know that the number of highly honorable and obligating commissions to have been entrusted upon BrittonBritton by now has grown quite substantial. No doubt, this one ranks right up there at the top of that list. We've been working on this project since last summer. Shortly, we will be presenting a large number of units that you will be able to follow here on brittonbritton.com.

The first of these is the website www.nobishotel.com, which we aired discretely prior to the press event. On this website, you can read much more about a hotel which will become — we dare promise — Scandinavia's best, coolest and most exciting.

We dare also claim that this project, along with the other ambitious plans for the Norrmalmstorg area (of which you can also read more on www.nobishotel.com) will contribute in a major way to the already commenced process of moving the social and commercial epicenter of downtown Stockholm from nearby Stureplan back to Norrmalmstorg and adjacent Kungsträdården (King's Garden) park — a most intereseting and welcome development which we at BrittonBritton will do our upmost to support in every which way we can.

www.nobishotel.com is a simple "pre-launch" website that still contains a number of flaws and errors soon to be corrected. A brand new generation of the site will of course be launched once we near the opening next December. Until then — have a nice read!

On thing is for certain: we'll meet in Norrmalmstorg in the future!

PS. A great big salute we hoist to our dear old friend Stefano Catenacci and his gastronomic team at the Operakällaren grand eatery which earlier this week was crowned Sweden's number one restaurant — no small honor! — in the overall experience cathegory (food, service and atmosphere combined) in the prestigious White Guide's annual ranking. What a year for Stefano - this embellishment, the Royal wedding in the approaching summer and the opening of our hotel later in the fall. Stefano rides with the Gods right now. It wouldn't surprise us in the slightest if his hot streak continues and into the upcoming week and he will be endowed with his long overdue second Michelin star. DS.

"We want to define a sense of luxury that is Lexus rather than Mercedes or BMW — a luxury for people who want the upmost of comfort and performance, but who don’t want to pay excessive ridiculous money just to flash a showy image"

-Sandro Catenacci, owner and CEO of the Nobis Group

At last: we buid a hotel in Norrmalmstorg square and close down the game...

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