Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim museum jump-started the trend of small cities paying big bucks for architecture to draw tourist pesos (aka the Bilbao Effect) back in 1997. Now, architourists have new cause to make the pilgrimage to northwestern Spain: after spending a day in the galleries at a Gehry, they can stay in one. A new hotel from the master of rumpled titanium has just opened in the tiny town of Elciego, roughly 100k south of Bilbao, in the wine-growing region of La Rioja. The hotel Marqués de Riscal is part of a larger winery complex of the same name, and incorporates a vast wine cellar under the building, and a vinotherapy spa where you can soak in oak cask tubs (and pretend you’re fermenting?). The exterior is trademark Gehry, like some kind of spacecraft from planet Pritzker touched down in the middle of an otherwise picture-postcard village. Reuters has a rough cut of their tour of the hotel posted, where a spokesman admits that locals refer to the building as “the thing.”



A local vintner is more circumspect, saying: “There are detractors, there are people astonished by it, people who think it is too much, people who don’t see any architectural value. But time will put it in its place. I think it is going to be very interesting.”

Elsewhere:
- Rioja in a designer glass (Guardian)
- Marqués de Riscal Google mapped (Tagzania)