Tabarka Beach Hotel

In 2013 the Tunisian architectural firm Archi Tech, Architecture and Technics International designed the reception desk of a 5 stars hotel in Tabarka, a splendid tourist centre in Tunisia, not far from the Algeria boundary. The Milan company Italian fit Out employed Devoto for the job, which will eventually realize the bar counter, the library and most of the wood cladding of the common areas too.
The reception desk of the Tabarka Beach Hotel is an example of a design that wants to match a traditional material (solid zebrawood) with a contemporary one (Solid Surface). Both were modeled to get an organic shape with double curved volumes, 13 metres long.

Size and shape make it an only piece, not only from an aesthetic and formal point of view but also from a technical and logistic one. The desk was manufactured and transported as one block in one container.

It is made of a bearing base of wood with an organic shape, a vacuum-formed top in solid surface and a back counter hosting the workstations.

The engineering of the zebrawood base was the most important step: it allowed time optimization for the pantograph work, the production and installation.  More than 3 cubic metres of solid wood were cut, glued, pantographed, sanded and then glued and sanded again in order to get an organic shape generated by 6 arches of different curves.

The top, a thin surface (6 mm!) in milk-white Solid Surface was pantographed and vacuum-formed to create the 3 domes that hide the equipment for the back counter from the hotel guests’ view.  Thanks to careful and proper gluing and an accurate polishing of the surface, the top turned into a unique double-curved surface, without visible junctions.

The back counter is equipped with 3 workstations from where the 130 rooms and the 130 hotel apartments will be managed.

Click  here for Tabarka Video