A 400-cover banqueting room in a business-district hotel, refurbished between two trading quarters with the room out of service for eleven weeks.
The constraints were commercial. The hall had to seat more people than before, hold three separate functions behind movable partitions, and photograph well for a wedding market that books largely from images. Marina Design Group worked within a tight ceiling void and an existing column grid it could not move.
The ceiling carries the project. A shallow coffered field in ivory sits above the tables, edged by a perimeter cove that washes the walls and lifts the apparent height. Downlights are dense and individually dimmable, zoned so that a single quarter of the room can go to dinner levels while the rest stays bright for service. The studio spent most of its lighting budget on control rather than fittings, a decision that shows in operation and not in photographs.
Columns are wrapped in bronze-tinted mirror and clear mirror in alternating panels, which doubles the apparent depth of the room and hides the structural grid. The same bronze reappears in the partition tracks. Along the flank wall, a run of mirror at high level reflects the ceiling and keeps the room from feeling like a box.
The carpet is the room’s one loud element: an oversized floral in browns, taupe and blue-grey, woven in Yogyakarta. Its scale was set so that a full pattern repeat spans the gap between two banquet tables, which keeps the floor legible when the room is dressed and hides wear in the traffic lanes.
Tables are standard rounds in white covers with taupe organza sashes, and the centrepieces are tall calla lily arrangements chosen to clear sightlines across the table.
The jury acknowledged a competent, hard-working commercial interior delivered under real pressure, and singled out the lighting zoning as genuinely useful. The award stopped at Honorable Mention because the room’s language — mirrored columns, chair covers, tall florals — is the standard vocabulary of the sector, and the project does not push it anywhere new.
Marina Design Group is a Singapore practice of thirty-two, working across hospitality, corporate and mixed-use projects in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2004, it runs an in-house lighting team and an FF&E procurement arm, which is how it handles refurbishment programmes with short closure windows. The studio's banqueting work accounts for roughly a third of its output. It is a frequent collaborator with regional hotel operators and rarely publishes residential work. The office is led by managing director Serene Tan, who joined from an operator background in 2010, and its project teams are organised around delivery windows rather than sectors. Roughly half its work is refurbishment of rooms still in service.