The Room Mate chain of modestly priced design hotels likes to think of itself as a family – founded by three friends, each branch has it’s own name as each child in a family does. Fair enough, but when you start inventing biographies for your hotels, complete with human photo, career, personality and fake friends, it’s time to take a step back. Still, it does lend the venues a friendly face, which is never a bad thing in a big city.
The newest addition to be welcomed into the fold is Room Mate Pau, a few minutes’ walk from older sister hotel Emma and a stone’s throw from the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona. The guest rooms of Pau are cheesy, but in this case that’s a good thing; the designers have created a cool white interior with structures that resemble slices of Swiss dairy echoed in the headboards and wall partitions. Elsewhere in the public areas there are dramatic details of faces on a large scale, with peering, piercing eyes, disembodied, roughly carved heads and an enormous wall mural covering the elevators giving Pau real personality. When we say modestly priced, it ain’t cheap, but with brothers and sisters emigrating over the world, this is a family worth getting to know.
