Photography by Virgile Simon Bertrand
TIMELESS FUTURISM
HOSPITALITY PROJECTS
Thirty eight floors above Hong Kong, inside the sculptural steel skin of Zaha Hadid's Henderson tower, Studio Paolo Ferrari has built a room that asks to be entered rather than seen. Peridot is less a bar than a cocoon, a space designed to fold its guests away from the city rather than frame it for them.
The architecture makes its intentions clear from the walls in. Ceiling and wall merge into a single continuous plastered surface in soft green, interrupted only by a grid of frosted acrylic cylinders capped in steel, glowing faintly against the render like something between a constellation and a control panel.
Ferrari has described the effect as a sense of infinite expansion, though the feeling in the room is closer to compression, an intimacy built through repetition and low light rather than scale. Mirrored finishes catch the shifting daylight and, later, the city's night glow, so the room never quite settles into one fixed mood.
Materially, Peridot leans tactile and warm against that abstraction. Mohair upholstery, high gloss lacquered furniture, and carved alcoves sit against the soft green plaster, drawing on the intimacy of old world smoking rooms without borrowing their nostalgia outright.
Function announces itself at the bar counter, carved from a single mass of green marble, elemental and grounding against the ethereal grid overhead. It is deliberately theatrical: the scale of the marble amplifies every motion behind it, every pour and stir led by mixologist François Cavelier landing with a kind of choreographed weight. The acoustics shift here too, tightening around the counter so the sounds of service cut through the hush of the surrounding lounge.
The room's real discretion is saved for what sits behind it. A concealed door opens onto a private room fitted with a stainless steel and marble bottle display, each holder cantilevered and engineered as carefully as it is sculpted. It reads as the room's quiet crescendo, a reveal built for those who know to look for the door rather than for anyone passing through.
What holds Peridot together is restraint applied to spectacle. Nothing here relies on nostalgia to do its work, and nothing performs for its own sake either. Every material, every carved alcove and cantilevered shelf, serves a single, tightly held atmosphere, one built for lingering rather than display.
