03 / Moss Hotel

A hotel in two buildings, and a guest who does not know which

A boutique hotel above Salamanca Place in Hobart, in the original waterfront warehouses. We set the site as a field notebook. Every image is a numbered note, the greens are named after the places they came from, and the pages nobody usually designs get the same care as the homepage.

The brief

Moss is a new boutique hotel in the original Salamanca Place warehouses, and the building is the reason to stay there. It has been a trading floor, a whaling store and a publican's. The site had to carry that rather than look like every other hotel site. There was one practical thing to solve as well: Moss is in two buildings, at 25 and 39 Salamanca Place, a block apart, so a guest needs to know which one before they arrive.

What we built

01
The whole site is set as a field notebook. Every image carries a numbered caption, so a photograph reads as evidence about the place
02
The palette is named after where it came from. Underbrush Green is sampled from Mount Arthur and shown as a swatch beside the photograph it was taken from
03
Latitude and longitude sit under the opening statement, so the location is a fact before it is a claim
04
A drawn map of Salamanca Place marks both buildings, 25 and 39, on a page of its own
05
The hotel's own archive is used, including an 1833 engraving by Jules Dumont d'Urville

Screens

The Moss homepage: a wide photograph of the warehouse frontage captioned 'Note 1, Moss, Salamanca Place, Hobart', then a statement about the hotel with its latitude and longitude beneath it. — The opening statement carries coordinates. A hotel whose selling point is where it is should be willing to say exactly where that is.

A drawn map of Salamanca Place with two buildings picked out in green and pinned 25 and 39, captioned 'Note 1, Moss locations, Salamanca Place, Hobart', under the heading 'Which building?' — The page that earns its place. Moss is two buildings a block apart, so the question gets a map and a heading of its own.

The Moss Rooms page: a full-width photograph of a loft room with stone walls and tall curtains, captioned 'Note 1, Loft room', above a paragraph and a Check Availability button. — Rooms are photographed as rooms in a warehouse, lit and captioned the same way as everything else on the site.

A single room page on the Moss site, with a large interior photograph and the room's detail beneath it. — One room, at the same scale the building gets.

The Lost and Found page: a photograph of a green car outside the Oamaru Squash and Badminton Club, then an Eat and Drink row listing Aloft restaurant, Frogmore Creek winery and Ettie's wine and charcuterie room. — Lost and Found is the local guide. Naming the restaurants and wineries the hotel actually sends people to is worth more than a link to a review site.

Outcomes

Which building is a page with a map, not a sentence in a confirmation email
The photography is captioned as evidence, so the building carries the argument
A local guide, Lost and Found, gives the hotel somewhere to send guests that is not TripAdvisor

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