The Hotel Continental in Hanko was built in 1900 to serve visitors to the spa town. Lars Sonck designed the building for a location where the city ends, and the sea takes over the landscape. The glamour of spa life had vanished already long before Mirja-Riitta Norri (MRN Architects) was commissioned to design an apartment block adjacent to the hotel. The Hotel Continental had been transformed, first into the Seurahuone assembly rooms and then into the Hotel Regatta, an oddity clad in asbestos boarding and corrugated sheet metal. In the 1960s the Meripaviljonki was built next to the former Art Nouveau gem; the new building, a composition of straight lines, was, however, dismissive of its surroundings.

Now on the site of the former Meripaviljonki is a new urban apartment building, one that clearly has a kinship with the original Hotel Regatta. The rendered and dignifiedly configured façade of the new building continues the same street line as the hotel and exudes an Art Deco-influenced modernism. Its rear courtyard façade, in turn, takes note of the controlled Art Nouveau composition of its neighbour – and the building even has a corner tower. A more conventional multi-storey apartment block façade, with large glazed balconies, opens up around the street corner.

The aim of the project was to save the Hotel Regatta by renovating it, something made possible by the construction of the new building. The renovation began in 2009 when the new building development was already well underway. Many of the original details on the façades were restored and the result is respectful for the original Art Nouveau architecture. The whole project, designed by Mirja-Riitta Norri, Irma Verhe, Ilkka Andersin, Reeta-Maria Laine and Tuuli Kassi, was completed in 2011.

Source: Finnish Architectural Review 2/2014