| A tower of light is at the heart of the hotel. The atrium floods the inner court with light from two sides as well as above, whilst the red wall of lifts allows guest onto corridors connecting to the bedroom blocks – half of which look inward to the atrium, half outward to the airfield. The architecture for once is more spectacular from the inside than it is from the outside, and the sense of place is enhanced by the installation of a tower of wine as the centrepiece, rivalled for me only by the massive, million litre aquarium in Berlin, or Hilton’s enormous Alan Jones sculpture in their atrium at Heathrow. Even at night the internally lit wine tower and the red lift shaft still dominate the space. |
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| The internal atrium has been used by many hotel designers and appears in Hiltons, Sheratons and many others. Few have as spectacular centrepieces as this wine tower with its flying Wine Angels, or (rollover to see) Berlin Radisson's million litre fish tank |
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:: Panoramic Views
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The wine tower is of course, a piece of theatre, in which there are nightly performances by the ‘Wine Angels’ who fly the wires to retrieve the wines from the tower to guest orders (see the video for how this happens). Theatre is an element talked about by hotel designers but rarely implemented as literally in the way Radisson have done here or in Berlin (where the centrepiece fish tank is actually run by a Sea Life centre that has its own discrete access allowing paying customers to rise up inside the tank on an hydraulic lift). In Stansted the spectacular and graceful dance of the high wire artists is a nightly occurrence at the centre of the bar that surrounds the base of the Tower.
The atrium surprises and delights in many ways, and its theatricality is not confined to the wine tower. The lifts decant guests onto high level walkways that offer views over the whole space as the guest walks to their rooms, in itself a somewhat theatrical experience. Yet the space is skilfully designed to allow for smaller zones of privacy within the space, areas for families to cluster, or business people to meet and wheel and deal. Changes in colour and texture assist, as does the mix of granite, carpet and timber flooring. Visually strong the internal space is managed well, with a balance of interest entertaining the senses throughout the areas.
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Above: classic still life at the side of the lift tower - rollover to see the figures that are behind reception, echoing the flyers of the wine tower
Right: The cluster of individual reception desks facing the main entry doors are characteristic of Radisson SAS hotels. Underneath this image is a part of a speciality resturant. Discreet spaces like this are tucked into the sides of the atrium, as is the main restaurant, supplementing the central eating area around the bar and providing more private areas for guests.
Below: the red column of lifts gives access onto clear walkways for guests.
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As in other Radissons, the trade mark separate reception desks allow staff to ‘own’ an area in which they operate. They also serve to break down arriving guests into small lines as they wait to register. The location of the hotel, barely 25 yards from Stansted's main terminal and in walking distance of many car parks, is a major coup for the group. Not only does it provide a place to park and stay for people starting a journey from here, but also a good location for meetings and conferences making use of the facilities and meeting rooms of the hotel. It inevitably benefits from the new road and rail connections built primarily for the airport (the UK is known for Government neglect of its infrastructure, with a £billion spent on studies in the last nine years but little actually achieved).
The atrium has four restaurants and two bars that can service not only hotel guests and conference delegates but also those or whom the hotel is a welcome alternative to the facilities in the terminal itself. In addition here are banqueting facilities available within the conference and meeting room complex that spring off one side of the atrium, beneath bedrooms.One would expect this hotel to have a primary use by travellers, but in fact it has a great deal of conference and business traffic, and many take advantage of the free internet connections provided as a part of guest service by the hotel – something other hotels should adopt. Certainly the free internet has attracted conference business to the hotel and it remains a mystery to me how any hotel can operate conference or exhibition facilities and either charge or in many cases not even offer internet broadband WiFi connections.
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