HOTEL L’ARLATAN
Step into the vibrant world of artist Jorge Pardo in this heritage getaway in France
“I constantly play a game with colours I’ve used forever and ever” JORGE PARDO
Tucked among the ancient Roman architectural treasures and elegant hôtel
particuliers of the southern French city of Arles sits L’Arlatan, an unexpected rainbow-hued jewel of a contemporary hotel. Every inch of its 41 rooms, public areas, guesthouse, restaurant and even the pool floor is an explosion of colour, from the psychedelic tiles, which spread across the floors and walls to the laser-cut plasticised flower-like lighting and handpainted doors and cupboard façades.
The hotel’s owner, Maja Hoffman, an art patron and pharmaceuticals heir, commissioned the Cubanborn artist Jorge Pardo to work on bringing L’Arlatan to technicolour life after visiting Tecoh, Pardo’s vast home in Mérida in Mexico’s Yucatán. Here, she saw his complex of buildings, pools and gardens as a living, breathing art installation. Pardo, now based in New York and Mexico, had designed and built everything from the tiled floors and kitchen cabinets to the hammocks and origami-peaked ceilings.
Consequently, Hoffman wanted the same artistic vision for L’Arlatan, hoping the artist could bring light and joy to the dark and neglected rooms of what was once a former 15th-century palace belonging to the Counts of Arlatan de Beaumont.
The first thing Pardo did was reconfigure the hotel’s various buildings, which are set around a private courtyard. “It was a nice little hotel, but it was a mess — every room had a weird closet that didn’t make sense, and sometimes you’d have to go up to go down, so I wanted to clean that up,” he says.
Pardo also needed to honour the building’s heritage-listed details. Working with Arles architect Max Romanet, ancient walls and wooden beams were preserved while ceilings were restored with a special pigmentation technique before the frescoes could be faithfully repainted.
To unify the space, Pardo designed a floor to cover 6000 square metres, made up of more than two million
tiles in 11 patterns and 18 colours that were handcrafted in a workshop in Ticul, a town outside of his Mérida studio. “The pattern literally changes every couple of metres, never repeating,” says the artist, whose mixed-media paintings, sculptures and furniture are in the permanent collections of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London.
Against exposed brick walls and pockmarked beams, Pardo has added further pops of wild colour via the elements he and his team in Mexico have designed and produced. There are fretwork metal panels used for railings, banisters and bars (the pattern imitating Mexican banderine garlands) and more than 1300 pieces of furniture, made from tropical Mexican wood and woven cane. Hundreds of walls, doors and cabinet façades have also been handpainted by the artist, depicting people’s faces and distorted and tweaked street scenes inspired by photographs he had taken on his many travels.
L’Arlatan is just one of many regeneration projects Swiss-born Hoffman has brought to Arles, where she spent her youth and, coincidentally, where designer Alessandro Michele showed his Gucci 2019 resort collection. Hoffman asked India Mahdavi to renovate and redesign the 19-room boutique hotel Le Cloître, which opened in 2012; she has introduced the openair café L’Épicerie du Cloître, and the Michelinstarred La Chassagnette restaurant, which sources herbs and vegetables from its own organic garden. Hoffman is also the president of Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles (the city inspired the artist in the late 1880s) and the driving force behind the Luma Arles foundation, which is overseeing the creation of the $175 million Parc des Ateliers cultural centre, due to open in 2020. A former railway yard, architect Frank Gehry’s distinctive 56-metre-high stainless-steel-clad tower now looms like a gleaming beacon of hope at its heart.
Hoffman’s trust in what she calls Pardo’s “gesamtkunstwerk” approach to design and colour — an all-encompassing work of art — has resulted in creating a unique hotel stay. “I constantly play a game with colours I’ve used forever and ever,” says Pardo. “Each time, it’s how can I make it different from the last?” The breadth of scale and intricacy of Pardo’s work has brought vivid charisma to a surprisingly affordable hotel — rooms start from as little as €99 a night. “I make spaces I want to be in,” says Pardo. “Hopefully it is somewhere warm, open and cogent enough that people will want to be in it too.”