Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
A three-story wall of art where water and sky meet light.
A long-time interior-design client came to Pretorius Studio with a new challenge: creating a dramatic six-panel art installation to grace the lobby wall of the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego. This luxury highrise hospitality venue has stunning waterfront and Pacific Ocean views. The designer asked us to come up with a way to represent water, sky and light across the lobby wall’s 29-foot-high concave pillars. With those broad parameters, Pretorius Studio went to work.
A six-panel painting built on strong process.
Our exploration began with extensive art research to fuel our inspiration. We created eight maquette explorations ranging from realistic to abstract, each featuring a different artistic interpretation of the client brief. Then we worked with the client to ultimately narrow down to one approach for large-scale artistic development on canvases. Since the wall segments featured concave arcs, we mocked up a fluted panel to evaluate the chosen creative techniques on its curved surface and explore how light would refract across the arc.
Even after a direction is chosen, artwork development includes a great deal of creative refinement and problem solving. We experimented with various ways of applying silver and gold leaf for the most dramatic effect. We also formulated a range of colors in translucent blue ink that could be applied over the leaf without dampening its metallic luminosity. We developed all six panels at full scale in our Chicago studio. At 29' high by 7' wide, each vertical panel was hung horizontally along our studio wall, and our artists worked entirely in this sideways orientation.
After the client’s initial creative approval, we had just nine weeks to complete the project. The interior design team visited our studio to view the work in progress and were very excited. We crated and shipped the panels to the hotel and traveled to San Diego to install the artwork on-site in the lobby. As our team applied each panel to the wall, the towering scale became real. The result is a magnificent lobby entrance hall, with immersive luminous waves washed in light.
“From initial concepts through to artwork creation, logistics for the finished work and onsite installation, we handle every facet of every project for every client.”
