Blow Up Hall 5050

Class: Deluxe

Style: Cutting edge

Rooms: 22

The concept, frankly, sounds like a classic Russian Reversal joke: in Blow Up Hall 5050, hotel room chooses you. This place is half interactive art project, half high-design boutique hotel — guests in its stylish public spaces are monitored on video, and their images are incorporated into a real-time video installation. Oh, and it’s in Poznań, in west-central Poland, a city on the way from Berlin to Warsaw, which will likely be new to at least 95% of our readers.
The whole thing was conceived as a collaboration between the founder Grażyna Kulczyk and Rafael Lozano Hemmer, a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist. And just about every part of the experience is non-traditional — you’re not given a choice of room type, but subjected to a sort of personality test, the results of which determine the style of your room from one of three categories. So while it may be an exaggeration to say the room chooses you, you’re certainly not choosing it. Nor, while we’re at it, are you using a key or even a key card to let yourself into the room that chose you, but rather (somehow) an iPhone.
It’s almost easier to list what is conventional about the place. The bar does serve drinks, and the restaurant does serve food, which is nice. And the rooms, however visually eccentric, do come with such necessary comforts as beds and baths, in addition to rain showers, Bang & Olufsen televisions and iPod docking stereos. Apart from that we’re not in a position to make any guarantees — if you’re brave enough to try it out you’re definitely in for an uncommon experience.