Architects Stephen Williams Associates have completed a hotel that looks like a shipping warehouse beside the harbour in Hamburg. Named the 25hours Hafencity, the hotel features a ground-floor lounge with gridded markings on the floor and a conference room inside a freight container. Visitors check in at a desk of plywood boxes and can pile up their luggage on industrial trolleys.

Each room comes with a trunk that hinges open to reveal a desk stocked with drinks, a logbook, information packs and electrical sockets. A boxing punch-bag and bespoke sit-up chairs are all that comprises the hotel gym, but neither is sheltered from the rain. The hotel is located in the Hafencity development area in southern Hamburg.

Beijing’s shopping mile turned significantly cooler this week after Maison Martin Margiela opened up its new store. Currently it happens to be largest retail location of the French brand and catches attention with some nice design details and a fabulous material combination.

Another good reason to visit beautiful Paris soon! Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela has completed his first hotel interiors at the Maison Champs Elysées in Paris. The designer furnished 17 new suites at the existing hotel, as well as a restaurant, bar, smoking room and reception.

A diamond-shaped light hangs from the ceiling of the reception hall, where stainless steel lines the walls. In the suite named Loose Covers in White, as well as in the hotel’s lounge bar, chairs and objects are covered in the designer’s trademark white fabric.

French studio FREAKS freearchitects have inserted a rectangular timber tunnel inside this Paris cosmetics shop. The shop, called Heliocosm, also features bright turquoise walls and a table where customers can mix their own natural cosmetics. An opening cut away from the wooden box provides the location for a salvaged second-hand table, while integrated shelves display products. The tunnel leads from this workshop area to a lounge, where a wall-mounted photograph creates the illusion of a window facing snow-covered mountains.

This year’s London School of Economics students can take time out from studies in a custom-built lounge, where boxy white stools slots into walls and a central table.  Students with work to do can plug their laptops into plug sockets and data points located within framed recesses in the walls.

Angled mirrored panels on the walls and ceiling create a slightly surreal perspective as you walk in. A central desk has been custom made with pullout seating for all that hot-desking students do nowadays and a bench at the rear is the perfect place for a little bit of inter-disciplinary fraternisation.

Zaha Hadid Architects have completed a showroom in London for Spanish bathroom brand Roca. Undulating white walls surround a reception and lounge area that snakes through the interior of the Roca London Gallery, which is located on the ground floor of a mixed-use building near Chelsea Harbour. It consists of a single floor measuring 1,100m2, where it appears that water has sculptured and defined each and every detail of the space.

Arched openings lead from the reception into concrete caves, where products are displayed on integrated shelves and lights sit within recessed grooves. These rooms are formed from a jigsaw of glass-reinforced concrete elements that slot against one another with visible seams.

Roca intend to use the showroom as a venue for exhibitions, seminars, meetings and other events.

If you´re still in London after the Design Festival 2011, don´t miss the recently opened exhibition documenting the working processes of the international architecture practice OMA at the Barbican. The exhibition runs from 6 October until 19 February 2012

OMA/Progress presents a diverse collection of over 450 items from the practice’s archive including sketches, documents, photographs, models and material samples. At the entrance to the show is a free public gallery containing an index of all of OMA’s projects, videos of lectures by the firm’s partners dating from the 1970s to the present and a shop. The main space presents OMA and their current projects. A large projection scrolls constantly through every image saved on OMA’s server at a rate of 20 images per second, taking 48 hours to reach the end of the loop of almost 3.5 million pictures. Upstairs, exhibits are grouped according to themes such as movement or colour and material, while one room is completely covered in waste paper that Rotor collected from OMA’s offices.

Prada has roped in French actress Léa Seydoux for its new perfume, Candy. Inspired by the Apache, a dance performed in Paris in the 1930s, Seydoux can be seen doing wild moves with her piano teacher, guiding him instead of being guided — presumably the idea of a woman conveyed by Prada, which is clearly after a new younger, more daring audience.

introducing Nef, an Istanbul real estate “laboratory”

In Collaboration with the New York designer/composer Sébastien Agneessens, the booth offers an amazing sound-based artwork that will be embedded in the infrastructure of a 35-story residential tower created by seven world-class designfirms and debuting in 2012

my personal highlight at the fair, standing in front of this beautiful objects, Gänsehaut.

The two polish architects have inserted three gabled huts inside a Warsaw clothes store. Garments for clothing retailer Fiu Fiu hang on railings inside each hut, while shoes are arranged on shelves that fill the windows. The cash desk is located inside the first structure and abuts one of these openings. A fitting room, storage and a staff kitchen are all concealed in the spaces surrounding the huts.