25hours Hotel The Circle is an audacious redevelopment of a landmark building whose rotunda gives the Circle its name. The vibe is retro-futuristic, in the classic late-modernist West German utopian style, full of pastel colors and rounded forms, designed by Werner Aisslinger to pay tribute to a bygone era and to please the contemporary traveler’s eye.

The vibrant, youthful 25hours hotels have been a sensation in the German-speaking world, and have steadily expanded to the west — but it’s only now, with the advent of the 25hours Hotel Terminus Nord Paris, that they’ve finally crossed the border into France. And how did they adapt? Largely by involving the locals in the design decisions. The Augsburg-based design agency, Dreimeta, engaged Visto Images, a Parisian firm, to collaborate on the hotel’s visual identity, tailoring it to its location in the 10th Arrondissement just across from the Gare du Nord — a location that, despite its convenient rail link, is on the fringes of Paris’s traditional tourist centers.

Bikini Berlin is set in West Berlin’s old heart, between Tiergarten Park, the Berlin Zoo, and the shopper’s paradise of the Kurfürstendamm. It’s a location that’s truly one of a kind. Equally unexpected is the near-pastoral setting, thanks to the views over the park and the zoo — the décor is pure “urban jungle,” unfinished concrete mixing with vibrant colors and natural greenery, all accentuating the leafy surroundings.

From Düsseldorf you expect precision German engineering, and the Swiss design team for 25hours Das Tour delivered that and a distinct French influence. The rooms, in fact, are one or the other: industrial metal surfaces and saturated colors in the German, a warmer, more Mediterranean style in the French. The sauna and gym recall the typically German obsession with health, this one is styled as a tribute to the Tour de France.

The Royal Bavarian is located at the literal heart of the city, in what were once the Imperial Post and Telegraph offices. And while there’s just a touch of Imperial pomp, it’s thoroughly ironic, and it’s only one ingredient among many in 25hours’ playful postmodern blend: from vaguely Alpine knotty wood to retro subway tile to ornate wallpaper, and everywhere a riot of bold color.

This first Swiss outpost of 25hours is also the first full-scale hotel project by the beloved local designer Alfredo Häberli, best known for his novel re-makings of everyday objects like chairs and coat hangers and cutlery. In another context, one such object would be merely a pleasant novelty, but cumulatively, their effect at 25hours is to pull guests into a world conjured by the sort of person who genuinely believes the coat hanger can be improved upon.

Hamburg knows the value of its waterfront, and is currently rehabilitating huge swaths of industrial harbor sites to drum up more visitors. Case in point: the erstwhile Office for Electricity and Harbor Construction, gutted and reinhabited by 25hours Hotel Hamburg Altes Hafenamt. The past still lives in its way — a whiff of the sea-captain persists — but it’s combined with a healthy dose of the boutique chain’s fresh irreverence.

The 25hours at Museumsquartier is adjacent to the museum district and the Neubaugasse shopping quarter, in a spot that appeals perhaps more to the Vienna’s hip young creative class than to opera-history obsessives (for the duration of your stay you’ll be steeped in post-modern whimsy rather than Romantic drama). Vienna’s famous circuses provide historical inspiration as well, which helps explain the riotous colors and the generally maximalist interiors.

Werner Aisslinger’s interiors at 25hours Langstrasse never quite abandon the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan shuffle, as it were, but they do beautify proceedings with a delightful penchant for Belle Époque ornamentation; the man loves his color. If that sounds artful, you’ll be glad to hear of the actual artist’s atelier on site, wherein resident aesthetes take turns producing original works for eventual display in and around the building.

HafenCity is Hamburg’s big urban renewal project, a redevelopment of a sizable portion of the waterfront port district. The 25hours designers were clearly quite aware of their location — the décor is full of references to the shipyards and docklands of old Hamburg. The theme lends a certain shipboard charm to the smaller of the rooms (or cabins, as they’re called), and a bit of added personality to the larger ones.

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