Hotel · Opatija, Croatia · 2026

Twenty-six rooms into thirty-five

The full renovation of a hundred-and-thirty-year-old Secession hotel on the Adriatic. Twenty-six rooms became thirty-five within the same two thousand square metres — with our own Zsolnay porcelain lighting, and with the building permit granted.

26 → 35

Keys

2,000

m² — unchanged

The task

A twenty-six-room hotel had to become a thirty-five-room hotel. The building is two thousand square metres — and it could not grow.

A hotel's economics live in the key count: the return at twenty-six rooms is a different business from the return at thirty-five. Same house, same structure, same façade.

The answer

Four floors, identical plans. The nine extra rooms did not come from redrawing the rooms; they came from the services. We created shared risers that all four floors hang off. Once the wet cores stack, the plan can be standardised — and from that point the room size is a design decision rather than a consequence of where the pipes already ran.

The key count was won in the riser layout, not in the room.

The existing building was built in the Secession style a hundred and thirty years ago. Opatija became the Austro-Hungarian Riviera in those same decades. We did not look for a new style. We brought the Secession vocabulary back quietly — arched openings, a repeating lattice, gold and emerald, where the house was asking for it anyway.

The chandeliers in the public areas are our own design. Two variants of the EOS chandelier — Zsolnay porcelain in the green-gold eosin lustre invented by Vilmos Zsolnay — were drawn specifically for this building — EOS Slim and EOS Gravity — and the walls carry Just Play, Zsolnay sconces, also ours. For Just Play we built a configurator, so pattern and colour can be set project by project.

A quiet wink: the pictures in the guest rooms show bathing ladies of the turn of the century. A seaside hotel, a seaside subject — and the same era the house comes from.

What it took

The work began by surveying what was there: point cloud and digital twin, because a hundred-and-thirty-year-old building does not match its own drawings.

The scheme was carried through with Croatian co-designers. Local legislation, the authority process and discipline-level approvals are their ground; concept, coordination and construction documentation were ours.

The building permit was granted

The documentation covers every discipline: architecture, structure, MEP, power and low-current electrical, acoustics and landscape — alongside full interior design. In a building like this these are not sequential items: nine new rooms move openings, openings move structure, structure moves service routes, service routes move ceiling heights.

Location: Opatija, Croatia
Year: 2026 — ongoing
Type: Hotel, full renovation
Existing: 26 keys
New: 35 keys
Floors: 4, identical plans
Gross floor area: 2,000 m²
Survey: Point cloud · digital twin
Disciplines: Architecture · structure · MEP · power and low-current · acoustics · landscape
Interior design: Full scope
Building style: Secession, approx. 130 years old
Own products: EOS chandelier — EOS Slim, EOS Gravity · Just Play sconce — Zsolnay porcelain, green-gold eosin lustre
Tool: Just Play pattern configurator
Status: Building permit granted · in progress

Credits

Interior design: András Krizbai
Architecture: András Toldi
Co-designers: Croatian practice

Lift lobby with mustard wall covering, copper lift doors, antiqued mirror and a chain-curtain chandelier — The lift lobby takes the same EOS family at full size.

Lift lobby with an oak arch, mustard walls, a copper lift door and a large EOS chandelier, with the door to room 101 alongside — Lift lobby.

Long hotel corridor with arched niches, antiqued landscape wall panels and a row of chain chandeliers — The corridor carries EOS Slim — the variant of our own Zsolnay chandelier drawn for this building.

Three arched niches with painted glass panels showing a garden scene, framed by concealed lighting — The painted glass panels quote the building’s period without copying it: each niche is framed in concealed light.

Staircase with a red runner beside a bronze-glass lift shaft with a timber door — The stair is the spine of the house; the four identical floors hang off it.

Room with a sage upholstered headboard, a colourful gilt-framed painting, two table lamps and fitted joinery — Double room.

Room with two windows, a wall-mounted television between them, a sage bed, armchair and timber worktop — The windows are the existing façade openings.

Room with a backlit fluted oak panel, upholstered headboard and a round ottoman — The fluted oak panel with concealed light — the room’s one emphatic surface.

Room seen towards the wardrobe block: lit shelving, minibar, coffee machine and fitted joinery — Wardrobe and wet core in one block. The wet cores stack across all four floors.

Room with an upholstered wall panel behind the bed, a painting of a bather, long desk and integrated minibar — A bather, in the manner of the painters of the building’s own decades.

Bathroom with a green wall, marble-effect shower enclosure, fluted green vanity and patterned floor tiling — The size of the wet core is the price of the key count. Everything that fits in it is built in.

Glass-walled shower in marble-effect tiling, with a green-walled vanity area and a backlit oval mirror beyond — The shower seen from the entry: the glass wall lengthens a short plan.

Suite with a scalloped brown leather headboard, concealed lighting, a mustard armchair and a desk — A suite. Same structure, different scale — the headboard echoes a Secession profile.

Suite seen from the entry: leather headboard, mirrored hallway, fitted shelving and a white daybed — Guest room.

Bar counter with a curved copper edge, an antiqued mirrored back bar and a green geometric illuminated motif — Above the bar, another Zsolnay decorative element with concealed lighting. Beside it, Just Play sconces — pattern and colour are set in a configurator, project by project.

Survey material is measured data · visualisations are of a renovation not yet carried out, not photographs · post-production includes AI-based upscaling and retouching · the images of the art programme are AI-generated works, not reproductions of existing paintings

Ren Design is a Budapest interior design studio working across Europe and the Gulf. On this project it delivered full interior design, the architectural concept for the renovation and discipline coordination, with Croatian co-designers — and the lighting is its own product family, made in Zsolnay porcelain. The scheme has been granted its building permit.