Hotel The Exchange is a fashion hotel in the centre of Amsterdam with unique rooms ranging from 1-to-5 stars. Rooms are dressed like models on the runway by young fashion designers from the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI), allowing you to sleep in fashion and wake up in style, in the centre of Amsterdam. Soetekouw created seven different rooms for the hotel.
Eighties room
Dressed to impress in bold and fun eighties retro style, this room was outfitted with an oversized black and white patterned sweater and a tight-fitting tube skirt in a rainbow of colours. Both the graphic knitwear, in white cotton with some Lurex blended in and a black elastic yarn, and the rainbow weave were crafted in the TextileLab of the Textile Museum Tilburg. The 1980s styling, by the way, is not just a fashion fad. Hotel The Exchange is housed in three original buildings: one dating back to the seventeenth century, one to the 1970s and one to the 1980s.
Marie Antoinette
This room is dressed in eighteenth century costume drama style, featuring a rich mix of romantic and luxurious fabrics and typical details from that era such as the corset with its slimming panelling and lacing for the walls and a giant hoop skirt covering the bed. Inspired by the frilly, feminine tastes of Marie-Antoinette, the legendary Queen to the Dauphin of France, Louis XVI, and a fashion icon in her own right, the fabrics are all embellished by hand with stitched or stamped flower patterns in a bouquet of pink tones. The room’s romantic costume is accessorized with a matching pick ‘n mix of wallpapers and furniture.
Room of misunderstood creatures
Fashion could never flourish without the unbridled fantasy of its creators but these fantasy worlds can also reveal a darker side. Fashion illustration is a perfect medium to express these subconscious wonderlands. The Room of Misunderstood Creatures is a fashion installation including three lovely yet troubled illustrated creatures, a pitch black ceiling that is crying its dark tears down walls dressed in sheer white, and accessorized with hand-drawn, strangely proportioned furniture. Colourful shiny sequins everywhere, especially in the white lacquered floor and along the black tears add a magic sparkle to this gloomy setting. The complexity of the Misunderstood Creature is perfectly expressed in the custom designed fabric that dresses the windows and furniture, a triple layer knit with a dark nude skin, a core of black loop yarns and a sheer and shimmering nylon surface.
Mattress room
The essence of a hotel room is that it offers you the comfort of a great bed away from home. Soetekouw took the mattress as her inspiration and turned it inside out, dissecting it into its vulgar parts and from there looking for the sheer beauty and strength of the materials to dress two rooms. Mattress Room Original is wearing a highly functional winter coat put together from three rather masculine materials found inside a typical box spring mattress: the 3D fabric of iron bedsprings, the non woven recycled textile padding and the foam layers in which a pattern – inspired by the glue stains on the original mattress – has been burned out by laser.
Mattress Deluxe
Soetekouw’s desire to literally get inside the mattress also led her to develop a Gobelin or damask-like fabric with which she upholstered another room using a meticulous traditional lathing technique. The precious fabric is custom woven by the Textile Museum Tilburg in two different colour schemes using an experimental mix of yarns such as paper yarn, viscose, cotton, mohair and gold Lurex. Mattress Room Deluxe is nobly dressed in the wintery white variety.
New Rembrandt Room
Innovative fashion designers often reference the work of their predecessors, meticulously reinterpreting the great moments in fashion innovation. The Rembrandt room is devoted to an item of clothing that goes back to the way men of stature dressed in Holland’s Golden Age. The millstone collar has been painted many times in all its colour nuances of cream and white. Here, the pleated collar is detailed with sewn-in parallelogram creatures. All of this leads to a three dimensional origami-like folding creation.
