Coil + Drift Takes On Its First Hospitality Project at Oregon’s Unique Jennings Hotel, Where No Two Rooms Are the Same

John Sorensen-Jolink’s latest project was a homecoming of sorts. The founder of Brooklyn-basedCoil + Driftgrew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers with his family splashing in the waters of the crystal-clear Wallowa Lake. Now, some decades later, he’s returned to outfit a room at theJennings Hotel,the area’s buzziest destination. “I’ve been going to this area for my whole life,” the designer tells AD PRO. “My mother grew up going here; it was her family’s vacation every summer and, when it was a boardinghouse, my uncle actually lived here all summer one year.”

Now, the former boardinghouse (and, allegedly, onetime brothel) in Joseph, Oregon, has been reimagined as a new kind of design-centric hotel, thanks to founder Greg Hennes. In 2016, Hennes began slowly rolling out his concept for the Jennings Hotel, in which each room is outfitted by a different creative. The hotel also hosts artist residencies and runs the nonprofit Prairie Mountain Folk School, initiatives which bring new, creative energy to the quiet town.

“It’s six hours in the car from Portland, so it has this kind ofMarfafeeling in the sense that it’s not easy to get to from anywhere, which kind of makes it feel more special,” Sorensen-Jolink says. The designer had long been familiar with the building and its location thanks to his family and childhood ties, and he had been closely following the Jennings since its opening. “I remember reading about it and thinking, wow, I know exactly where that is and how cool that this town is having a renaissance,” he says. “Then I heard about the artist residencies after the designers from Grain [a design studio based on Seattle’s Bainbridge Island] did one.”

When Hennes approached Sorensen-Jolink atICFF,the designer recalls, “I was hoping maybe they would ask about a residency, and then they reached out asking if I’d like to do one of the last rooms and I was like, definitely!”

As Coil + Drift’s first ever hospitality space (and its first major interior space in general), Sorensen-Jolink says the project was “really a process of discovery.” For the room, he blended custom millwork and built-in furniture (all done by the Jennings’s in-house team) with furniture from his own line and a few vintage additions.

His design concept began with one word: cozy. “Every space is a different layout,” Sorensen-Jolink explains of the hotel. “Mine is the smallest, and the first room you see when you walk up the stairs. It’s a tiny L shape and immediately when I saw it I thought, we need to do a built-in bed. Because I wanted it to feel like this little cozy nook that you never want to leave—you just want to curl up and, you know, write your novel or whatever.”

The built-in bed, like a built-in desk across from it, makes clever use of the space—while also addressing practical concerns, like under-bed storage big enough for luggage (“I hate it when you’re in a hotel room and you have to leave your suitcase out in the open,” the designer says).

As for the palette, “I wanted to use rich, dark colors,” explains Sorensen-Jolink. “A lot of the rooms were using white with a lot of wood tones, and I thought, let’s do something different. I’m well aware that the winters are very cold and require lots of coziness, and the room has a huge window, so I know it would get a lot of light in the summer.”

In fact, that light led to one unexpected result of Sorensen-Jolink’s scheme, which features gray paint in two different finishes on the bottom and top halves of the wall. Though the designer initially envisioned a more blue-toned gray, he discovered on his first visit that a brick wall outside casts a pinkish glow on the room, “which,” he says, “I’m totally OK with. It’s interesting to discover the things you can only see once you’re actually in a space.”

Plus, the warmer tone plays nicely with the room’s white-oak floors—which were hand-laid by Hennes’s team—and the room’s centerpiece, a woven wall behind the bed.

“我认为这是一个Pierre Berge住所where I’d seen this full wall covered in woven cane framed in that way,” Sorensen-Jolink says of his inspiration for the wall treatment. “It really felt almost at the same time Southern and Japanese, which probably was intentional.” The designer worked with Hennes to create a woven treatment framed in wood painted the same color as the walls.

“It was really a way to both give the feeling of a headboard in a space that we knew didn’t have space for it and also to give dimension and structure to the room with this visual trick of the eye,” Sorensen-Jolink explains. “It really makes the room feel like it’s larger.”

至于最后的触动,designer says, “I knew I needed some vintage accessories to make it feel finished. I went out to the three towns in the Wallowa Valley. I went and found the few antique stores. It’s really not a touristy area, so they were all filled with these beautiful pieces that were half of the cost they would be in New York.” There, he found unconventional items, like a solid brass grain scooper (“It just looks so sculptural,” he says. “It’s hand-hammered solid brass and was, I think, $25”) and orange-tinted barware. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to source accessories locally—and my backup plan was to buy online—but the area is just so full of these antique treasures,” he says.

The room’s lone artwork is a photograph of Wallowa Lake taken by Hennes, which ties the room, in all its coziness, back to its majestic and remote surroundings, a true reminder of the hotel’s most coveted offering. “What I kept coming back to was this idea that hotels are not just an escape from your daily life but also a real opportunity for adults to dream about living in a different reality.”

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