Hotel Marés

The brief asked for a reception that photographed well and a circulation system that would still look specified after five summers of Mallorcan tourism. Those two requirements pull in opposite directions, and the project resolved them by using two finishes from two collections rather than one finish everywhere.

V04 Calacatta Oro is used only in the public rooms: the reception desk front, the bar back wall, and the two lift lobby panels on the ground floor. All of it came from eleven consecutive slabs of a single firing, book-matched in pairs, so the vein on the desk continues across the return.

M09 Notte does the work. Every corridor floor, every lift lobby above ground level, and the skirting throughout — 1 900 m² of it, in 12 mm, on an adhesive bed over a screed. The super-matt surface was the deciding factor: a polished dark floor in a hotel corridor is a maintenance contract, not a finish.

The junction between the two is deliberate and visible. There is no transition strip and no gradient; the gold stops and the black starts, on a line that follows the edge of the reception ceiling raft above it.