A Room, a Drill, and a Window

There was a man drilling into a wall three metres from where I stood, and somehow the room still looked like it had been finished for a year.

That was Savoy 1918 in the week before it opened — a boutique hotel launching this summer in Oslo under HEIMR Collection, and the job Marita Wahlquist and Georg Frøyen Soltvedt brought me in for, shooting ahead of the launch for press and for Small Luxury Hotels of the World.

"Finished" was relative at that stage. Builders in and out, equipment in the corridors, whole sections of the hotel still mid-build. The actual job was finding the angle where none of that existed.
I don't plan much going in. No reference pictures, no idea already in my head of what a room should look like — just a slow walk through first, camera down, letting the light tell me where to go. What struck me here was how ready the finished rooms felt on their own, drills going or not.
Handheld, on the Leica, mostly wide open — soft tones throughout, nothing sharpened into a brochure. And clients who agreed with me, which is its own kind of luxury. They let me make the pictures I felt were right.