You see the roof before you understand the building. Pink, gold and silver ribbons rise above the low sandstone buildings of Elciego, while the vineyards continue almost to the hotel itself. Frank Gehry's Hotel Marqués de Riscal makes no attempt to resemble a conventional wine château. It places a new, restless silhouette above an estate whose history began in 1858. [1][2]
Three colours drawn from a wine bottle
The roof is made from titanium and steel, and its colours come from Marqués de Riscal's own bottle: pink for the red wine, gold for the mesh around the bottle and silver for the foil over the cork. It is a simple explanation for a form that otherwise seems almost impossible to hold in the mind. From every viewpoint, the ribbons change direction, overlap and allow the light to alter the metal. [2][3][4][5]
Gehry had already demonstrated at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao what titanium could do at scale. In Elciego, the contrast is more concentrated. The new hotel stands between the medieval town and the estate's older buildings, including the original 1860 winery. Marqués de Riscal describes the whole as the City of Wine: a collection of cellars, hotel, restaurants, spa and visitor facilities. [2][3]
Sixty-one rooms, no simple floor plan
The hotel opened on 10 October 2006. Today it has 61 rooms and suites, including ten suites, divided between two buildings connected by a raised glass walkway. According to the hotel, the rooms differ in both form and outlook. It is a logical consequence of the architecture: asymmetry continues from the external metal ribbons into the floors and walls, so a room is not simply inserted into a repeating hotel corridor. [1]