Paris museum installs one-room hotel on roof

PARIS (Reuters) - An art installation consisting of an actual one-room hotel offering 1970s-style glamour, artistic cachet and a view of the Eiffel Tower was lifted into place on the roof of a Paris museum on Tuesday.

Hotel Everland, the creation of Swiss artists Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann, will remain atop the Palais de Tokyo until the end of 2008, functioning as both a museum exhibit and a room where people can stay overnight.

Looking rather like the bachelor pad of an imaginary pop star from 1972, the room has curving beige couches to recline on and admire the view, a turquoise-tiled bathroom and a record player with a collection of vinyl discs but no television.

"It's what we thought of as an ideal hotel room," Lang told Reuters as she watched a giant crane being prepared to winch the prefabricated green unit up from the back of a truck.

Hotel Everland, originally conceived for Expo 2002, has already spent 18 months at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig. But the view from the Palais de Tokyo, incorporating the Paris skyline and the Eiffel Tower, is of a different kind from the east German tower block guests saw there.

"You shouldn't need a television," Lang said.

She said it was important for the work to be an actual hotel as well as a part of the museum. Guests pay 333 euros ($473) a night during the week and 444 euros at weekends, a comparable rate to other hotels in the chic 16th arrondissement, with charges used to cover running costs.

Guests book online (www.everland.ch) but stay for only one night and during the day, the room can be inspected by museum visitors.

Reservations, which opened at the start of October, have been brisk and the first two months are already booked out. But the two artists have not been tempted to change trades and abandon art for the hospitality industry.

"It's absurd to have a one room hotel and it's never going to be a success as a business plan," Lang said. "We just like to play around with the idea of exclusivity and luxury."