From Mexican design firm Omelette: “Mexico’s culture has been sculpted by its prolific natural world and its blessing/curse of petroleum. Hotel Básico is an exploration of these twin mothers and their vastly undervalued aesthetics. Its furniture and finishes are not new, novel additions to the world, but reconfigurations of that which exists. The lobby floor is made of taxi tires. Cabanas are old truck beds. Former industrial petroleum tanks have become swimming pools….” Hector Galvan, the designer behind Omelette, also runs materials stores with a focus on recycling, a beach furniture company called el compadre, and is responsible for an eclectic range of design projects.Omelette’s line of recycled furniture designed for Hotel Básico. “This project is a walk through the forgotten field of the Gulf of Mexico. Our undervalued backyard where richness and contradiction flow freely. República is a counterculture work which instrumentalizes the displacement and re-population of design within México. It is a response to the overwhelming yet unacknowledged presence of petroleum. It is a physical rediscovery of materials. It is nature. It is underdevelopment. It is inventive recycling. It is an exploration of the vast potential for aesthetics that exists outside of centralized production.” There does seem to be some fetishization of the homemade and recycling in what actually seems to be a very high-end hotel, but the recycling is real and the design does seem very well thought out.
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