The Grand BATA Hostel

The Grand Bata Hostel is a project that continues researching alternative methods of living and building construction. It investigates how emphasizing the absurdity and questioning the everyday can evolve into playfulness and how it can affect East Tilbury’s community.

East Tilbury has a lot of personalities with twisted stories. The choice of the narrative in Term 1 is Stacey, a local hairdresser. She has heard enough gossips through creating a mobile hairdresser’s salon – ‘Stacey’s KITSCHen’, a perfect place to encourage the community to be able to share the extraordinary stories of Bata-ville.

Term 2 has revisited a local storytelling with the main character as a narrator of the story of The Grand Bata Hostel. The project takes an inspiration from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, where the ‘over the top’ principles are applied. The project has a form of an unconventional megastructure wrapped around Stanford House, where the residents are the main characters of the living construction, benefitting from the new approach in bringing back the community spaces and providing the additional extensions. The community also helps young homeless adults, who are seeing temporary accommodation in the hostel, gaining skills to help them in seeking better future.