A grand stair - the stage for performances as much as idle procrastination - leads up to the HotelHotel lobby. The timber of the stairs is a heavy, grounded, stacked agglomeration. Freed to scatter up the walls and across the ceiling, the suspended timber filters exterior light and views into and from internal spaces. Spidery, pixellated shadows are cast on the floor and bare walls.

The stair links Nishi Commercial to Nishi Residential, a multi-storey apartment building, housing 2 floors of hotel rooms, wrapped around a central courtyard and light well. The ground floor contains HotelHotel's lobby, reception, concierge and bar, as well as retail & hospitality tenancies.

The walls in the hotel lobby ' as seating, benches, counters - are an attempt to bring the handmade into the rigorous, polished building around it.

Materials - custom gluelam timber, precast concrete beams - are allowed to sit, unadorned, stacked in a simple manner, overlapping, their joints overrunning and poking out. The singular system is stretched where needed, opened where useful, broken where forced. A large space is enveloped in this manner and then diffused, variegated by operations within these rules, to allow for spaces which have their own character. Doors that are part opening, part display, continue this language in apparently weightless steel.

This steel is picked up to lighten the bar, where stacked concrete props up sleek steel, which weaves into and halts the flow of suspended timber bursting up the stairs from the commercial lobby. Above the seating in front of the bar, large holes have been punched into the concrete slab capping the space. These portholes allow glimpses into the courtyard above and natural light to enter the space