Hotel Holos

Class: Comfort

Style: Cutting edge

Rooms: 7

Architecturally the Spanish are unfazed by the mixing of the new and the old — in Barcelona, for example, works by Calatrava and Gaudí comfortably exist side by side. So it’s only natural that in a historic district like Heliopolis, a sort of concept city built within Sevilla for the 1929 Iberoamerican Exhibition, you’d find a hotel like the Holos.

On the one hand it fits right in with the whitewashed cubic forms of this quiet residential neighborhood. On the other hand, though, there’s the veil, an aluminum latticework canopy, spread like a metal spiderweb around the fringes of the building.

For this you can thank the architects, MGM Arquitectos, who added the canopy as a part of a rather extensive renovation. Today the building’s exterior is just about the only period feature remaining; the bedrooms are as modern as can be, the lines clean and minimal, the surfaces finished in white paint or natural beechwood. Modernist chairs are the rule, and the six double rooms (and one lonely single) are lit by articulated halogen lamps, the sort that architects just can’t seem to resist. It’s seven rooms and not much more: the café with its glass-walled interior and aluminum-shaded exterior is the hotel’s social center.