Founded in 1997, Amsterdam-based architecture and interior design firm Concrete won the Dutch Architect of the Year Award in 2012. Concrete spent its fledgling years creating a range of stylish and interesting commercial interiors in the Netherlands. Over the past few years, however, Concrete has broadened its horizons, taking its Supperclub concept worldwide and expanding its citizenM concept, a hip hotel brand offering low prices and high design values.

Concrete’s team consists of visual marketers, interior designers, product designers and architects who work on projects in multidisciplinary teams. Concrete develops total concepts for businesses and institutions. The agency produces work that is commercially applied, creating complete identities companies, buildings or areas. Concrete does not have a pre-determined style, preferring to devise solutions on an individual basis.

Concrete believes that translating functionality and ease of use always depends on the given situation and that function has no definitive style. Frequently, the firm’s solutions represent a complete break with existing, traditional types of designs for buildings and interiors. That is why its designs are both obvious and unexpected. The basis for this successful approach, according to Concrete, is the lack of distinction between the expressiveness of different design disciplines.

Concrete derives inspiration from the modern world. Its designers take contradictory ideas from various aspects of life, and they create a collision of styles that is expressive of the post-modern age. According to Concrete, it loves provoking, confusing, philosophizing, scale models, haute cuisine, burgers and, most of all, shattering dogmas. Concrete provides solutions rather than grand theories or abstract ideas, and it likes to let its work do the talking.

Five Projects by Concrete

citizenM hotel, Bankside, London.
Completed in 2012, the citizenM hotel is a contemporary venue featuring an open plan lobby that is designed to look like a living room. Vibrant colours, modern furnishings and contemporary art are found throughout the hotel. The delineated spaces, which blend elegance with exuberance, were created in cooperation with Swiss furniture design giant Vitra. A text piece by Turner prize-nominated artist Mark Titchner is mounted on the exterior facade, and there are interior works by Gavin Turk, Mario Testino, a video by Belgian artist Hans ob de Beeck and a stunning floor-to-ceiling mural by artist collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus (AVAF). The Titchner and AVAF works are original, having been commissioned by citizenM specifically for this hotel and its guests.

Three skyscrapers at Harborside Plaza in Jersey City.
These 66-storey towers consist of 2,500 apartments, commercial space and a parking garage. The towers are situated on the Hudson River front, directly opposite the Manhattan skyline. The project completion is scheduled for end of 2015 and is part of a new housing concept developed by Concrete based on affordable, compact but spatial, partly furnished rental apartments. The different types of apartments are flexible in use and therefore adaptable to any lifestyle. Common facilities and terraces provide space for neighbours to meet and create a local community.

Public library, Almere, Netherlands.
Concrete designed all public spaces within this new public library. The overall design scope consisted of 5,000 linear meters of book shelves and accompanying facilities. Concrete also contributed to the development of the shop concept. Instead of a standard library positioning and structure, the library is a place to stay, as in a modern retail concept. Within the new library shop concept, books are arranged in different sections, each of which has a lifestyle-orientated space where books are presented frontally. This way, customers can find their product directly, while fun shoppers can wander through the landscape of books and discover places to sit back and read. Meandering bookcases organise the landscape and create an environment of different identities. Additional functions such as seating, workplaces, info terminals and lighting are integrated into the bookcases.

Supperclub, Amsterdam.
At Supperclub, food, drinks, lights and sound are in complete harmony, merging into an atmosphere that offers an escape from the everyday world. The space is a white canvas that transforms into a cafe, restaurant, bar theatre and club. There are four different rooms; La Salle Neige, Le Bar Rouge, La Chambre Obscure and Les Toilettes Noir. La Salle Neige, the restaurant part, is a totally white space in which colour searchlights change the look of the room and video projections decorate the walls. Guests mainly eat from silver metal trays on huge white mattresses running along the two main walls. Le Bar Rouge can hold up to 60 people, and Les Toilettes Noir are named hetero and homo instead of male and female.

Vi Cool restaurant, Hong Kong.
This new restaurant from Catalan chef Sergi Arola recently opened its doors at the Harbour City shopping centre in Hong Kong. Arola’s cuisine is characterised by a large respect for and understanding of authentic Spanish products, and he often presents unaltered Spanish recipes in a contemporary way. The interior concept brings harmony between the menu, the character of the brand and the interior. This was realised by taking Arola’s cuisine as the starting point for the interior, and making typical Spanish products, authentic materials and Spanish colours part of the restaurant. Spain’s colourful daily life was reflected by using typical Spanish products, flavours, ingredients and colours as the basis for the cabinets, which are filled with items such as bottles of sherry vinegar, tinned anchovies and bottles of wine.