Designer Philippe Starck introduced the Maison Heler hotel, a striking nine-story structure in Metz, France, featuring a 19th-century mansion seemingly perched atop it. Entirely envisioned by Starck, the hotel intends to narrate the whimsical tale of Manfred Heler, a fictional character whose mansion has been lofted nine stories high.
“Manfred Heler has inherited his parents’ beautiful house,” said Stark. “As an orphan, he finds himself all alone, in this mansion surrounded by a large park. Everything’s going well for him until he starts to get bored. To cope with this boredom, he tries to invent everything,” he continued. “An extraordinarily rigorous and inventive man, he doesn’t necessarily succeed in everything he undertakes, but it’s always done with intelligence and poetry, guided by a naive desire to create meticulously at all costs.”
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This entirely metal-clad mansion now sits atop a nine-story monolithic tower, housing a restaurant, bar, and event spaces. In Starck’s imaginative narrative, Manfred Heler was inside the mansion when it unexpectedly ascended into the sky. The interior design aims to capture the essence of 19th-century style, reflecting the fictional ambiance of Heler’s home. Starck incorporated “whimsical objects” throughout the mansion, each crafted to enhance its surreal atmosphere. These include unique items like a crystal hammer, plaster anvils, double-ended axes, and inverted rocking chairs, all designed to evoke curiosity and wonder within the spaces.
“It’s springtime,” said Starck. “He’s daydreaming in his armchair. Suddenly, the earth begins to tremble. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. He looks around and realizes, to his aghast, that he’s going up in the air, along with his park, his house, and his armchair. He climbs and climbs and climbs until the shaking stops. Then there’s silence. Manfred is high above the city. His house has been extruded: as if a cookie-cutter had arrived from below, cut off the Earth’s cap, and mounted it vertically,” he concluded.
Beneath the mansion, the unassuming tower includes 104 bedroom suites. These rooms provide a stark contrast to the mansion’s eclectic style, featuring large windows, exposed concrete ceilings, and plain white walls, which can be mostly obscured by pale, full-height curtains. The hotel’s ground floor hosts the reception and a restaurant named La Cuisine de Rose, honoring Heler’s fictional lover. Unlike the mansion, the restaurant boasts bright interiors complemented by dark furniture and opens onto a terrace adorned with trees. According to Starck, the rooms have “an almost spartan spirit”. He says they are “stripped of any superficiality, where each material asserts its own color: the white of cotton, the grey of concrete on the ceiling and walls.”
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