Nerd habitat wins another major design award

This is the second major award for the quirky concept - a year ago, the newly opened bar took home one of the industry’s most coveted prizes, the European Hotel Design Award, for Best Bar. 

The jury's motivation focused on how well the bar was integrated with its surroundings, its success as a meeting place for both locals and visitors, and praised the designers as well as the owners for their willingness to take risks and break the mould.

Radisson Blu Riverside Hotel is located in Lindholmen, a former shipbuilding area that’s been transformed into a world-class science park. Lindholmen has always been a centre of innovation, but where heavy industry once ruled, researchers, scientists, nerds, deep thinkers, contrarians and coders now develop the digital technologies and communications of tomorrow. 

"When we got the job of creating a bar experience here," says Stylt founder and creative director Erik Nissen Johansen, "we quickly realised that it had to reflect this history and context. It had to really belong to the place and the people in order to be relevant, both to the locals and to visitors."

And so the hotel bar at the Radisson Blu Riverside is a highly eccentric celebration of science and scientists, and of the peculiar quality of mind required for true innovation. Not all scientists are mad, but it sure seems to help!  

Cuckoo’s Nest is an all-day, all-night social hub located in the arcane borderlands between genius and madness. It offers locals a warm refuge, food for both thought and body, inspiration (liquid, solid and spiritual), a congenial meeting place for like minds as well as space for solitary musings. For visitors keen to sample the energy of this exciting area, the bar functions as a portal to an otherwise closed world where beautiful minds think big thoughts, crack jokes about quarks, and draw diagrams on the tablecloth. 

(A Swedish version of this text is available in pdf format below)