Loisium Wine & Spa Resort Langenlois | Steven Holl Architects

It's an innovative concept: a hotel and spa for wine-lovers with an outstanding architectural approach. Set amid rolling vineyards in Austria's most popular white-wine region, the LOISIUM Wine & Spa Resort Langenlois appears to float on pillars and glass. The 82 guestrooms feature the wine theme and a map of an underground labyrinth of 900-year-old wine cellars, a motif used throughout the hotel. Airy rooms have large windows overlooking vineyards and the wonderfully rural lifestyle of the surrounding villages. The hotel features a lovely year-round heated outdoor swimming pool, spa treatments, a spectacular wine savvy restaurant, and offers trips to the educational wine center next door for tastings or seminars. Guests won't want to miss one of the trekking tours through the lovely surrounding vineyards, or a visit to the Danube valley with its monasteries and old castles.

This world-renowned wine- center is already attracting its own pilgrims, drawn not only to its spectacular look but also to its unique concept as a spa for vinophiles. Loisium's ground floor is almost entirely transparent, consisting of pillars surrounded by glass, which creates a hovering, suspended effect for the building that sits above. Featuring Holl’s trademark interplay of space and light, the design hotel’s public and private spaces are dominated by a few design elements: abundant glass and latticework, as well as a repetition of similarly proportioned rectangular forms in windowpanes, doorframes, counters, and even mirrors.

AN EMPHASIS ON CORK
Cork as a material, form and texture is realized in numerous details throughout the resort, from the lighting fixtures in the restaurant dining room to the texture of the lobby’s staircase and concrete walls. This emphasis on cork echoes, of course, the Loisium's raison d’être – to celebrate wine in a spa atmosphere. But it’s more than that – the lobby rejoices in design with the Kiesler Eck, a display of furnishings created for art maven Peggy Guggenheim in 1942 and available as reproductions by the modern Wittmann Carpentry Workshop. Colored concrete in a unique hue (a combination of ochre and adobe red) sets off the greenery that surrounds the glassed-in lobby.