Hellenic Chamber of Hotels stand

Since I have no photos yet of this project, I will post the renderings. I did this last April in Athens, at the Tourism Panorama Exhibition, for the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels.



The stand was a bit difficult as it was like a wide corridor, front and back open and sides closed. Plus, it had a hall column near the back open side. This immediately fixed the position of the storage room. This is a view from above:



Having solved that, the rest was pretty easy as layout was concerned:they needed a reception area and a lounge area, so that was achieved with placing a divider near the front of the stand. The problem was the concept - how to present the Chamber to the visitors?



Since the exhibition takes place in the spring and is mainly focused on Greek visitors getting info for their vacations in the approaching summer (Greek are notoriously late at booking their holidays), we decided that the concept would be the sea. How to achieve that in the corridor?
I used the length of the stand to my advantage:on the long side, a series of tall panels was raised, each having a small flat screen at the front, punctuated by a bubble light fixture above it. All screens would show the same clip on a loop, sea waves gently crashing on the beach, with the appropriate sound as a background soundtrack to the stand, to make people feel relaxed and welcome. The floor below enforced this with a special inlaid showcase of sand and pebbles for the whole length of this installation:



The divider was covered on both sides with excellent graphics designed by my talented colleague Zoi Gazilla, that enveloped it with the sea and its symbols:dolphins, sea horses, ships etc. The lounge area was particularly enhanced with this . You felt like you were sitting on an island terrace in the Aegean Sea.



The client loved it and did not make a single change. We incorporated some tourism photographs in the graphics at the back of the stand and also the logo of the client combined with the sea graphic in a sign on the storage room walls, as I wanted to keep things a bit minimal. It worked well at the show too - even competitors gave me compliments for the stand!



When I get real photos of this, I will post them for comparison - although the renderings do look almost exactly like the finished product.

Great way to start a new year

I was in the Netherlands for 10 days, supervising the set up of the Greek stand at the Vakantiebeurs exhibition in Utrecht. The show was a success and so was the stand - many people, professionals and visitors alike, commented that it was the most beautiful of the whole show. You could see many people getting photographed within the stand's premises, especially under the main attraction, the hanging "postcards"! You can see below many photos of the stand, including a detail of the "rainfall" of postcards, which I made one by one, taking me slightly more than a whole evening, and then one great guy from our crew hang them from the false ceiling, again painstakingly one by one, working almost at a 5 meter height. Their movement from the air drafts, combined with that of the floss curtains, made for an exciting vision in the middle of the stand!
Kudos to all of my crew and the collaborating crews (electricians and graphics crew) for setting this up in time despite many problems, all the people from the show that helped us enormously and the GNTO people from the Amsterdam offices for their support.
In a next post, I will comment on the rest of the Netherlands trip, architecture etc. Happy new year to all of you.