Bonaventure hotel

The revitalization of the Bonaventure Hotel represented a wonderful mandate for Lemay Michaud Architectes. It involved, among other things, rethinking reception, lighting and room identification as well as adding sculptural installations. Visual Home had the privilege of participating in the technical development and manufacturing of several components that now define the new face of the hotel.

Client

Hôtel Bonaventure

Architects / Designers

Lemay Michaud

Project

Reception wall, sculptural installations, luminaires and signage

Deliverables

Reception wall: steel lozenges with wood pattern thermal transfer & light box in the back 

Sculptural wall: steel rods and 1/2″ aluminum lamels & baked enamel 

Mobile:  aluminum and acrylic assembly with iron rods and wires

Luminaires: painted aluminum tubes and acrylic mounted on a steel plate & aluminum rings with LED diffusion 

Room identification: hot rolled steel plates with laser cut numbers & acrylic foldings on back for number readability 

 

The various piece of work for this modernization plan implied several difficulties to be overcome.

Take the case of the Calder style mobile that overlooks the restaurant. The concept of the designer required the suspension of metal pieces of different sizes fixed to iron rods in a very specific arrangement. The challenge was to create a stable and straight mobile despite aluminum parts of varying dimensions that would cause it to tilt due to the uneven distribution of weight.

Another important challenge was the design of the wall behind the reception desk. The hotel wanted a surface made of three-dimensional wooden diamonds, but unfortunately this option was completely out of budget. It was therefore necessary to find an alternative to wood, which would enable to obtain a visually similar result.

Here are some of the proposed solutions:

Mobile – rather than using a single material in the manufacturing process, which would inevitably have unbalanced the installation, we suggested an aluminum and acrylic assembly to distribute the weight. An unnoticed trick since our artist-painter subsequently treated each material to standardize the appearance of the pieces and get exactly the same aluminum look. Thanks to our recommendations, the mobile stands in a perfectly balanced position and corresponds in every way to the concept of the designer.

Wall – the solution put forward looks pretty much like wood, but is much less expensive and far more resistant. The wall is made of 3D metal diamonds on which we have printed an image of wood in thermal transfer. It was quite a job to mount these hundreds of lozenges on a grid and to space them to let a luminous box shine through, but our installers succeeded with flying colors.