Innovative Dutch architectural practice MVRDV has unveiled a new concept hotel at Dutch Design Week 2017, currently taking place in Eindhoven. The hotel, entitled (W)ego, is a brightly coloured structure made out of polycarbonate-fronted volumes that house nine guest rooms that can be reconfigured to suit the needs of inhabitants in the present and future. The project was conceived of by The Why Factory, an in-house research, development and innovation lab that explores different ways to inhabit cities in the face of current geopolitical, geographical and economic developments such as mass migration to urban centres, climate change and the densification of cities.

The idea behind (W)ego is that each of the rooms has been designed with a particular person living there in mind. When these spaces are put in close proximity to each other, the need to navigate the living conditions of others sharing the hotel reveals itself, and as such the inhabitants will be forced to co-habit in a certain sense. “Based on the hypothesis that the maximum density could be equal to the maximum of desires, this research conducted by the Why Factory explores the potentials of negotiation in dense context. Through gaming and other tools, (W)ego explores participatory design processes to model the competing desires and egos of each resident in the fairest possible way,” explains MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas.

The hotel’s nine rooms are orange, green, pink, purple and blue, and as such may not be ideal for anyone who desires a calm and neutral palette in their hotel room! Some of the rooms are fitted with ladders, others with hammocks, and some are mere sleeping pods. The hotel is purely conceptual in nature, but many hotels that exist in reality, such as the increasingly successful Yotel brand, take their cues from capsule hotels in Japan that promote small-scale living and have tightly designed guest rooms. Perhaps MVRDV’s (W)ego is one of the ways in which hotel design will be thought about in the future.