
Chic and Basic Hotel product packaging
The beautiful, minimalist and slightly irreverent design aesthetic that Barcelona’s Chic & Basic Born Hotel sets up with its stunning interior layout is carried through perfectly into its product packaging, which features cheeky, bold messaging in large, unadorned fonts.


Tagged: Barcelona, Barcelona Chic & Basic Born Hotel, cool hotels, cool product packaging
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There’s something to be said for staying in a hotel room that’s bigger than your Brooklyn apartment. Yup, it happens so rarely that when you come across it, you kinda want to hang inside, bask in the space, and imagine that this really is your life. 365 days a year. Ah ha, then you wake up. Anyway, I stayed recently at the beautifully designed Hotel Omm in the Eixample district of Barcelona, surrounded by the glitzy, sparkling shops that dot the landscape and by the disarmingly original Gaudi buildings that tower spectacularly above the skyline. It’s quite a sight. [photo by Alison Zavos] Read more

Barcelona’s Chic and Basic Born Hotel
My wife and I have just returned from a week lapping up the culture and exploring the long winding alleyways that run off the main streets in the center of Barcelona. What a magnificent city! The seamless blend of old and new in the architecture, food, and sounds, which float out of the bars and cafes, combine with a very distinct design aesthetic, which permeates the stores and hotels to create a thriving modern city with one eye firmly on the future and the other on the artifacts of its past. While in Barcelona, we spent a few nights staying at the sublime Chic and Basic Hotel [photographed above and below], located in the Born area. This hotel symbolized so much of what we considered Barcelona to be about. Read more
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YOU'RE SAYING (2)
Josh Maple said | 25 April, 2011
Hardly ground breaking. Have we not seen enough of this Helvetica, c’mon it’s been 50 years of the same ‘make it bold, kern it together idea’. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good typeface but it’s used as if it’s the epitome for ‘good design’. There’s nothing cute about that soap, and there’s nothing amazing happening on that sterile bottle either.
Rant over.
HAVE YOUR SAY
My Gran, bless her, ruined my chance of ever knitting. Forced to wear itchy home knitted turtlenecks, I quickly turned my back on the craf, preferring instead hypercolour, acid wash and sweet puff paint. Read more
Mariana Monteagudo’s work reveals an element of irony, not only in her unprejudiced use of iconography, but also in the way the artist takes features from toys, figures designed to arise tenderness, with their big heads and moving expressions. Read more
Ten Masked Men are a British parody band that does death metal covers of famous pop songs by Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and many others. One of my favorites is their cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’. It’s epic.
Handmade reconstructed jeans from Nashville. The Imogene and Willie shop is an old service station with no signage. They have great reconditioned leather cafe jackets, as well.
Have you ever felt engulfed by a strange mix of emotions, ones which make you feel all giddy? Well, that’s what this track — Not For All The Love In the World — does to me. French pop-folk extraordinaire Sebastian Tellier remixes Irish pop band The Thrills. Totally luscious and dreamy, especially the glockenspiel sound. Beautiful stuff.
Made from 100 percent organic cotton and eco-friendly, this super soft tee celebrates a sinister world of kaleidoscopic colours and ripples of psychedelia, of serenading Queens, of dancing flamingos, of unimaginable euphoria. It’s all the work of Sydney label, Das Monk and it’s available through the Lost At E Minor online store for just US$40. Now, there’s one hell of a Christmas present, even if we do say so ourselves!
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hector said | 29 June, 2009
The design of chic&basic´s amenities, guides and stuff is made by the Barcelona based studio espluga+associates.
Check out: http://www.espluga.net
for more of their work.