hotel murano

with denise corso design

The building was an early eighties brutalist hotel tower and meeting space wing capped by a cascade of skylights. It had been built-in to support the adjacent city convention center which became superseded by a larger facility a few blocks away. The cavernous public spaces were lifeless. Traditional rug-anchored seating areas felt like life rafts in a sea of gray. It would take a unique vision to revive this property.

It happens that Tacoma is the home town of the well-known and widely appreciated glass artist, Dale Chihuly. His success and then his establishment of the Pilchuck Glass School in the Puget Sound area attracted other creative glass workers. This eventually led to Tacoma becoming home to the Museum of Glass in the early 2000s. The further this celebration of glass art, the owners of the hotel decide to invite artists from around the world to contribute to a new experience named after the group of islands that are the center of Italian glassmaking in the Venetian Lagoon…the Hotel Murano.

The voluminous spaces of the hotel were a natural fit for luminous pieces of glass art from mirrored chandeliers to mythical Viking stories depicted on glass boats suspended in the Grand Hall. Because glass art comes in so many different forms, each piece needed its own method of display to highlight the inherent desire of glass to absorb, reflect, transmit and abstract light and color. Also guests are introduced to the individual artists in displays that depict their inspiration and techniques. These were creatively developed and detailed by Dardinelle Troen and her team at Ditroën.

Exterior windows at the public areas were filled with enigmatic stacks of plate glass allowing light through but never revealing what is on the other side. This inspiration is taken from the Greek glass artist, Costas Varotsos, who conceived the ten-story Orizon sculpture placed at the building’s exterior. Overall the experience is rich giving the guest new layers of inspiration with each visit.