There’s little to suggest that room 311 should be different from any other at One Hundred Shoreditch, the newest hotel from the group behind the South Bank’s Sea Containers.
Step inside and the trick — or should that be treat — is revealed.
Armed with props and accessories from some of Britain’s coolest makers, the space has been temporarily transformed into an ‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’ homage.
Striped and chequered textiles from Nordic brand Projekti Tyyny, which has its HQ in Dorset, jostle with colourful handmade ceramics and glassware by London-based Vaisselle.
Draw back the curtains for its most whimsical moment — a cottony cloud hung overhead and a yellow telescope pointed at the Shoreditch streetscape below.
It’s a clever attempt to cultivate a look instantly familiar to fans of the US film director, whose biggest screen successes include The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom.
His distinctive ‘know it when you see it’ aesthetic frames a precise blend of sugary hues, retro fonts and nostalgic tech with a healthy dose of symmetry.
When New Yorker Wally Koval started spotting Wes Anderson-like vignettes in the wild — think a nattily-dressed Japanese train conductor leaning out of a window, or an old hotel on a hairpen bend in the Swiss Alps — he could hardly have predicted that his efforts to document them would spark a runaway photography movement.
Five years later, the Instagram account set up as a personal travel bucket list for him and wife Amanda has snowballed to 1.6 million followers and spawned a 2020 New York Times Bestseller coffee table book with a foreword by the man himself.
Now strangers all over the world submit their own images to the Kovals, who have dubbed the members of this unlikely community ‘Adventurers’.
The makeover is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it celebration of the new Accidentally Wes Anderson Postcards book (Laurence King; £11.99), with the yellow telescope a nod to its cover shot.
A free exhbition, curated by Hackney gallery The Old Bank Vault, is showing a succinct edit of the book’s prints in a space adjacent to the hotel, from the powdery pink grain silos of an Ohio chocolate factory to a sign designating a camel crossing in Israel.
On November 2, The Old Bank Vault founder Sim Takhar will be in conversation with Wally Koval, who will answer audience questions and sign copies of the new book.
A stay in the Accidentally Wes Anderson room is £300 per night, until November 9, with all proceeds going to domestic violence charity Refuge.
Wes Anderson films to watch for interiors inspo
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Flemish Revival-style mansion, built in the late 19th century, has as much presence as any actor in this tale of an eccentric New York family released in 2001. Most covetable is Margot’s room, with its saturated ‘Prancing Zebras’ wallpaper — the now-iconic design was produced by textiles brand Scalamandré in the 1940s and is still available today.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Only Anderson could make life on a submarine look aspirational. The red beanies of this 2004 film may be a mainstay of hipster Halloween costumes everywhere, but it’s the Seventies-tinged home of the misfit oceanography team that will catch the eye of design enthuasiasts.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Perhaps it’s fitting that pastries are key to the plot of this 2014 commercial hit, because the eponymous alpine hotel is a confection of its own. While the pink exterior is clearly a model — it’s all part of the storybook stylings — the opulent interior was created within Görlitzer Warenhaus, an abandoned Art Deco apartment store in Germany.
