Magnicity attractions “welcome over 3 million visitors every year and offer the best views and unique experiences from the top of iconic cities”. The citation refers to restaurants, cafés and establishments located on the highest floors of various buildings, above the skies of the cities of Paris, Berlin, Rotterdam and Chicago. Now, from the end of 2024, the operator and promoter of the hospitality sector has among its attractions, on the 57th and 58th floors of the Zalmhaven Toren in Rotterdam – at 59 floors and 215 m high, the highest tower in the Netherlands – a new one: Celest Restaurant & Cocktail Bar.
“A unique experience from Rotterdam to the moon (…) through storytelling and spectacular design”, is how Magnicity sums up the character of its new establishment, in this case a restaurant, a cocktail bar and a shop. Indeed, its design, in other words. the interior design of Celest Restaurant & Cocktail Bar, is magnificent, the result of the painstaking work of Doepel Strijkers Architects.
In terms of narrative, it draws inspiration from one of the first stories of modern science fiction, which tells of the fantastic journey to the moon of “one Hans Pfaall”. So let us follow that story, but as told by Doepel Strijkers Architects and not by the original author – who is none other than Edgar Allan Poe – of The Incomparable Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond, Virginia, USA, June 1835).
On the first floor of the Zalmhaven Toren, the reception, which includes cloakroom, toilets and a shop, welcomes the visitor with a ubiquitous deep blue, as if we were… well, actually, we were at sea level. Or, as its creators put it, “contemplating the oceans of the Earth from afar”. From here, guests take the lift to the 57th floor. On entering the elevator, they find “a round window with a view to Rotterdam”. Then, as they ascend, the view out of the window “changes rapidly” to reveal the 19-day balloon journey from the earth to the moon that Hans Pfaall makes in the fiction, albeit “condensed to 30 seconds”. The architects achieve the effect through “interactive animation, sound [and] mirrors”.
On the 57th floor there is a cocktail bar and new experiences – in addition to the balloon lift ride. On the list, a large telescope gives those who look through it “key parts of the Hans Phaall story”. As if that wasn’t enough, when we look up, we find a giant moon – also interactive, as visitors can rotate it at will to see its hidden side – which gravitates in the opening to the top floor, the 58th. However, the bar itself, in other words, its interior design, its colours, its textures, its reflections, its changing lighting, also deserves to be added to the list as an experience, that of being enveloped by a “lunar landscape”. And what about the staircase leading to the top floor? Well, we’ll let you be the judge of that from the pictures.
A “circadian gradient” is what, according to the designers and architects, awaits us upstairs in the restaurant, on the 58th floor of the Zalmhaven Toren. Again, the dark tones envelop us in a kind of ether from which we only feel grounded by the gravitational illumination that floats on each of its four sides – in fact, the experience is much more at night. That is because its design, which we walk through in “a 360-degree view”, takes us smoothly and in parallel, that is, in a circadian way, along the “course of the day and the colours of the light”. Along this route we find the restaurant’s intimate spaces, or “moonpods”. Their lighting replicates the gradient of colours, “in a landscape that reflects the passage of time and constantly adapts to the daily cycle”.
But the experience doesn’t end there, a final… vision, shall we say, bids farewell to diners and guests as they make their way to the balloon lift to return to Earth. It is what is known in astronomy as an analemma, in this case that of the Moon: a representation of its position in the sky, if observed and recorded from the same place, at the same time of day, every day of the year, resulting in a curve in the shape of an 8 on its side. On leaving, we realise that we have encountered yet another instance of that trend that is well described by the binomial restaurant-experience – or restaurant & cocktail bar-experience.
Sources: Doepel Strijkers Architects, Celest Restaurant & Cocktail Bar, Magnicity.
Images: Mathijs Labadie vía Doepel Strijkers Architects.
