DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel & Conference Center La Mola. Terrassa. Barcelona.

La Mola hotel complex and conference centre is located on a plot of land adjacent to Sant Llorenç de Munt Park and the new El Prat Golf Club in Terrassa, Barcelona. The intervention consists of an extensive project of 186 rooms with infrastructures and additional catering services, meeting and convention rooms, auditoria, multi-purpose rooms and health and well-being assistance. Minimizing the project’s impact and providing such an extensive project in a soft setting, highly sensitized by the mark of the Golf Club, was a must from the outset.

The total mass is divided into four prismatic units with the aim of respecting the natural surroundings, mitigate the visual impact and control the location. The three buildings for the bedrooms and the conference centre adjoin through a fourth building, partially below ground level and occupying a central position, shares common areas and links to the different cores of communication. This central volume also houses the spaces devoted to catering services and rest. Its glazed façade is sheltered by weathering steel sheets evoking the texture of the wooded surroundings, and it becomes the point of reference of the intervention. A large tree-lined square sets a continuum between the indoor and outdoor spaces.

Most part of the hundred-year-old trees are staying in their original location or transplanted.

Two out of the three emerging buildings house the bedrooms, arranged lengthways down the central corridor.

The bedrooms facing south have a balcony with great views over the landscape and a solar protection system consisting of sliding punched metal sheet shutters in several shades, following a complete colour range from the landscape. This way, the colour sets the setting, not seeking to camouflage, but to get an artificial emulation on an unnatural support, deliberately imitating the woods and the artificial nature of the golf course. From the inside of the building, the setting is seen through an undulating veil, virtually intangible, slightly dimming it while filtering 70% of the sun’s radiation. The many glazed surfaces on the façades allow maximum benefit to be taken from the sunlight and winter sunbeams, whereas the tightening and the mobility of the metal drilled veil prevent overheating indoors during the summer.

In the third volume are located the convention facilities, several auditoria, multi-purpose rooms and numerous meeting rooms, arranged around an open lobby directly linked to the exterior on the ground floor and which projects its activities to open air. In the rest of the constructive elements, the predominant use of concrete, combined with pine timber panels and garden roofs, provides unity to the project as well as serenity and harmony in relation with the surroundings.