Hotelier Valieri Chekheria explains how his team transformed the headquarters of a Soviet printing press in Tbilisi into the Stamba Hotel in this movie Dezeen produced for the AHEAD hospitality awards.
Stamba opened in May in Tbilisi's emerging Vera neighbourhood. The hotel was designed by an in-house team at Adjara Group, the developer behind the project, and was awarded New Concept of the Year at the AHEAD Europe 2018 awards.
Stamba Hotel is located in the Vera district of Tbilisi, GeorgiaThe hotel is notable for its cavernous lobby spaces, which retain many of the building's original features, including printing equipment suspended from the ceiling.
"Stamba is located in an amazing Soviet architectural building" says Chekheria, CEO at Adjara Group, in the video interview Dezeen filmed for AHEAD in London. The project is a renovation of a Soviet-era printing press by local developers Adjara Group"It used to be a publishing house," he continues. "The first communist newspaper in Georgia was published there."
According to Chekheria, the space was designed to showcase its history. "We wanted to show what the building looked like when it was a publishing house. We didn't change the walls, we didn't change the ceiling, we kept it like it was before."
A glass-bottomed pool has been installed on the roof of the hotelWhile the lobby space retains much of its original character, Adjara Group did make one striking addition - a glass-bottomed...