Hi, a 38 room urban hotel in Nice located 200 meters from the sea, is the creation of Matali Crasset, France's leading young designer. Some hotels make you feel at home, others, like you're a guest.

Hi is a hotel with another approach based on conviviality, open mindness and exchange. It is a different way to conceive luxury by making it accessible. Hi proposes an experience where everything is prepared just for you and invites you to discover new typologies of contemporary space.Bold and innovative, Hi offers comfortable rooms with concepts to look at life in a different perspective. A building from the 1930's makes this metamorphosis possible.
Hi is seen as a modern and vibrant home. At its heart is the happy bar, a space that combines music, images, technology,business and culture. An active hotel where everything is modulable and available to use, Hi is a 'hands-on' space.
Hi is also a place where one can breathe easy and relax : an oxygen sphere to forget everything, begin anew.

A SENSE OF WELL-BEING
The different HI relaxation areas all focus on a sense of well-being.

Hammam
The contemporary style bath made entirely from resin is a genuine hammam with two hot zones and two adjoining rooms, one for relaxing to music, and the other for massage. Well-being also means enjoying the quite outstanding weather in Nice, with the warmth in the atrium garden, on the private terraces and spa terraces, and up on the hotel roof solarium.

Bathing on the roof
The highlight – or high point – for HI is the open-air terrace on the 8th oor, commanding a magnicent view of Nice, the Mediterranean and the Alps. The swimming pool reaches up vertically, like a huge terra cotta pot set on top of the building. And here is another room to enjoy, with its own built-in furniture (e.g. bar and chairs).
Different options are available for communing with the sun: on the terrace, in conversation around the tables, lounging on a deck chair or reclining on giant waterbeds providing the “beach front” setting. And the mini mobile parasols by day take on a different nocturnal identity, glowing with light.

HI offers nine different concepts for 38 rooms.
Each concept has its own special relationship to the space designed for both living and experimentation. The focus is not on decorative themes, but offers a broad scope with alternative approaches to the standard and strict rules usually applying to such settings.
The different areas are based on an open approach embracing spacious expanses, deliberately avoiding any specialized structures. The impression created is smooth, as movements ow from one activity to another, as experiences merge and are shared.

Monospace
The private room is open in style, designed in three stages where each has a color and purpose: comfort, relaxation and natural breathing.

Up & Down
Shelves made from interwoven chestnut tower on high, surrounding the area and forming a border between two zones: the upper zone is for services and the lower zone for relaxation. The bath zone is behind a chestnut screen, like a trellis leading to a garden.

Indoor terrace
All the furniture is arranged in the central area, with the furnishings forming a “stage” or indoor terrace, with all the facilities needed, for sleeping, sitting and so on. At the far end of the terrace, a plant screen provides theprivacy needed for the shower, while the toilet is in the style of a garden shed, presenting a lantern-like appearance once the lights are on.

Happy Day
The room focuses on the shift from day to night – a process of metamorphosis. Daytime has a sitting room with a lounge in harmonious white and sherbet green wood; by night two doors are opened, leading to a pink alcove and revealing the other half of the bed. And the reverse side of the door is equipped for total night-time comfort, with, for example, water jug and slippers.

Strates
Here is a room to be experienced moving from one stratum to the next, starting from the bottom and moving to the top, storing, resting, watering, livening, relaxing and dreaming. The different functions are arranged in the space, but do not follow horizontal lines, preferring a vertical approach to offer a different angle on everyday life.

Digital
Here is a graphic room with a clear cyber-culture inuence. The walls feature giant pixels and the furniture is computer screens, one with a light box presenting both still and moving pictures, offering many new invitations and discoveries.

Technocorner
The room is devoted to sound and pictures, almost a private auditorium. The large screen can be seen from either bed or bathtub and turns into a dressing screen set between the bedroom and the bathroom. Then there’s the sofablaster – a sofa with built-in speakers and head-sets, plus the armrests containing a record collection from the “F Communications” label.

White & White
The room is an area of immaculate white, where traditional furnishing practices and styles have been swept aside. The table turns into a bed. The four-poster bed becomes a bathtub (an exclusive design for HI, made by Aquamass) clad in white vinyl and topped with a fuchsia-colored Plexiglas “bath sky-dome”. White & White is devoted to a sense of well-being, providing fresh – white – products. Some split-level rooms have a private outdoor terrace with private spa.

Rendez-vous
This versatile area can be modulated and changed from bathing lounge to ofce. The guest enters to discover a spacious bathroom, complete with lava rock bathtub, opening onto a private terrace, offering a living area with a shower and adjustable seating.

Fittings
Each room has interfaces centrally positioned at two points: the bed-head has controls for all the lighting and for the rolling shutters.and the “totem pole”, with all the key functions:
- remote controls for the hi- system and television with at LCD screen and satellite channels
- air conditioning
- DECT cordless phone on a direct line to the room
- analog or broadband Internet access.
HI has automatic bars on the different landings, for those thirsty moments when guests need spa water, champagne, fruit juice or wine.

HAPPY BAR
The bar is the focal point of the hotel, built around a suspended hot air balloon-style basket, both striking and ethereal, hovering aloft, suggesting a modern alcove, and imposing order on the space as it lters the light from both the street and the atrium garden. By night, the atmosphere is festive with lighting effects. The interior of the basket is used for evenings with DJs and for video screenings included in the HI.mages programs.

FOOD - CANTINE BIO BY ALAIN ALEXANIAN
An adjoining “laboratory” serves dishes to be combined, with an assortment of tastes, following rules set and regularly changed by the chef.

HI Food is a self-service area, open 24 hours a day, leaving total freedom for meals and snacks without any restrictions.

matali crasset designed “Link”– the white porcelain dinner service made by the “Manufacture de Porcelaine de Monaco” – for HI Food. Link has discarded conventional dinner table etiquette and invented new rituals. The dinner service has four containers, with the bowl being used as a cup, the teacup as a soup bowl, and so on. Here is a dinner service which will revolutionize our eating habits and prove that whether we are eating or having a coffee, the main idea is to be together. The “Manufacture de Monaco” was founded in 1972 by Erich Rozewicz, supported by their Most Serene Highnesses Princess Grace and the Prince of Monaco. The porcelain produced is of the nest quality, supremely white, ne, translucent and sturdy. www.mpdm.com