Disney goes artsy, European with its new Riviera Resort
Riviera Resort, a Disney Vacation Club property, has officially opened with a mix of European and artsy flair.
The starting point for the 10-story resort’s look was inspiration from European resorts in Italy, France and Monaco, said Dean Huspen, an architect with Walt Disney Imagineering.
“I think that we were just so enamored and inspired by those resorts that we studied and wanted to bring some of that here, but make it a uniquely Disney experience,” he said.
The 300-unit building’s exterior is a neutral tone with hints of rose. Small awnings and shutters are orange, blue and green.
“The awnings themselves are those color pops that sort of distinguish wing to wing,” Huspen said.
As for the stony base color, “we wanted to have a color palette that felt classical and sophisticated, even all the way up to the top. That’s actually a very subtle blue tone in the Mansard roofs. The lower roof areas are the darker sort of bronze tone. … It kind of lightens it as it goes up.”
Mansard roofs have double slopes, and Riviera Resort has several sets of them with a blue-shingled appearance. They mark key areas such as the entrance, largest villas in the resort, the rooftop restaurant and the tunnel that leads to a station for the Disney Skyliner transportation system.
Other design touches include metal work inside and out, plus repeated use of the resort’s double-R logo, which can be spotted in the sign, as a floor mosaic at the entry, on employee uniforms, on trash cans and incorporated into the chairs on balconies.
The lobby’s centerpiece is a hanging light sculpture with intertwined circular shapes.
“We wanted to have a collection of warm metals from darks to lights, and then they’re featured from a traditional to a modern expression as if taking tribute to those old hotels that would renovate over the years but they would keep things that are great and then they would add these new layers,” said Missy Renard, art director.
Disney has created 40 pieces of custom art for the resort that “reflects the style of a master artist along the Riviera,” she said. Disney characters are incorporated, sometimes subtly, too. Rooms and hallways feature cubist versions of “Beauty and the Beast” characters, water colors of “Aristocats,” oil works featuring Remy from “Ratatouille” and quickie line drawings of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy.
“We have everything from sketches to watercolors, oil paintings, and then even our mosaics that are in our tunnel walkway to Skyliner,” Renard said.
Those murals, based on up-in-the-air imagery from “Peter Pan” and “Rapunzel,” each have “over 500,000 hand-cut and hand-placed individually cut glass tiles that span across the ceiling in the tunnel,” she said.
Riviera’s accommodations range from the 2,500-squarefoot, three-bedroom grand villas (it sleeps up to 12 people) to a small space called Tower Studios, which are designed for just two guests. They have a queen-size bed that pulls down from the wall. The rooftop restaurant is named Topolino’s Terrace. (In Italy, Mickey Mouse is called Topolino.)
Riviera Resort is the first stand-alone DVC property to open at Disney World since 2004, when Saratoga Springs debuted. Since then, the emphasis has been on expansions, such as Bay Lake Towers at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, or renovations, such as Boulder Ridge Villas at Wilderness Lodge.