Illustrative artwork, not a design proposal
Original concept · Open to partnership
Asylum House
A refuge for independent minds.
A creative sanctuary for living and working · The Adriatic
The name
Asylum in its oldest sense: a place of refuge, inviolable, where one is safe from pursuit. For the people this house is for, the founders, writers, researchers, designers and the internationally mobile, what pursues them is noise.
Why it should exist
More people than ever can work from anywhere. Very few places are designed for doing their best work there. The usual answer bolts a coworking floor on to a hotel, or a bedroom on to an office, and serves neither work nor life particularly well.
Asylum House is conceived as a house first: a place with a point of view, a long table and a library, where ambitious people can concentrate, exchange ideas and recover, for a week, a season or longer.
What it could hold
Creative proposals, to be tested and developed with partners.
- Private rooms designed for living in, not merely for staying overnight.
- Places to work, ranging from the silent to the convivial.
- A shared table at the centre of the house, and the dinners that happen around it.
- A considered programme of talks, workshops and unexpected encounters.
- Places for solitude designed as deliberately as places for company.
- A real sense of community, without the loss of privacy.
Why it is different
It is neither an office with accommodation attached nor a hotel with good Wi-Fi. It is a house with a culture, and a culture is the one amenity that cannot be installed later.
The opportunity
Suited to a characterful building in a town with a life of its own, a house or palazzo waiting for a second purpose, or to an operator who would rather lead a new category on the Adriatic than follow an existing one.