New Work: ‘Inside: The Chelsea Hotel’

Justus Oehler and his team at Pentagram’s Berlin office have designed Inside: The Chelsea Hotel for the New York-based illustrated book publisher powerHouse Books. The book, by the photographer Julia Calfee, brings together images taken over the four years she has lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel; a centre for city’s bohemian scene that has played host to residents and guests including Mark Twain, Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jasper Johns, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Ethan Hawke.

Oehler says of the design: “The purpose of the design of the book was to evoke the special atmosphere of the Chelsea Hotel. The red mock-alligator surface applied to the title type is taken from a bench standing in the hotel’s lobby and the photographs shown on the endpapers are of wallpaper fragments found within the hotel. The main part of the book is kept in black and white, with strong, contrasty typography and Julia’s powerful and gutsy photographs.”

Click here to read about Inside: The Chelsea Hotel on powerHouse Books’ website.