Junkie hotel

The junkie hotel on the Maliebaan offers accommodation to 28 homeless people from Utrecht with a drug addiction problem. The project is part of the municipal policy to offer shelter to 200 addicted homeless people around the city. Besides the accommodation function, the purpose of the hotel is promote their physical health, add structure to the lives of the individual homeless people, and to initiate their resocialisation process.

The hotel comprises two parts. The monumental main building has room for 22 residents divided between two groups. They each have their own room and can make use of a communal living room and kitchen. In the garden house, a separate building at the end of the garden, there is room for six elderly homeless people.
The main building is a national monument of two identically mirrored buildings behind a single facade. The ground floor under the two buildings is taken up by the warden facilities. The reception, administration, conference room, kitchen and examination room are all organised along the facade. The centrally located, ivy covered passageway connects the various warden’s areas and contains all the necessary storage rooms. The two residential groups are accessed by entrances on each side of the warden’s areas.
 

The living room, recreation room and bedrooms are organised in three storeys on the front and rear facades. The remaining central area offers room for a service module which serves each storey, and which is made up of a kitchen, toilet, bathroom, storage area and installations room. By varying the programme and the remaining space per storey, a composition of stacked volumes is formed. The autonomy of the composition is reinforced due to the height of the volumes not being synchronous to the storey height. The various modules give each storey its spatial identity, while the three storeys jointly give a composition which lends shape to the residential group as a whole. The composition of modules becomes more intensely perceivable thanks to the glass fire wall in the staircase. The modules are covered in ivy print, which softens the enormous transition from the outside to the inside world for the addicted homeless people.