Rooms Studio, established in 2007, is the project of Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia, who founded the first female-run studio in their native Tbilisi, Georgia. “Ethnography, mythology, traditional and modernist elements hand-crafted using natural materials, such as: wood, stone and metal create Rooms Studio’s authentic language,” writes Elene Abashidze. “There is a vast sculptural aspect to the Rooms Studio practice...Spatial thinking in disposition of objects in relation to architecture, puts Rooms Studio’s practice somewhere in-between modernist and symbolist styles, where the line between art, design and architecture is blurred.”
For their part, Janberidze and Toloraia credit their Georgian heritage and their intuition as their inspiration, seeking to blend both ancient and more recent history with decidedly contemporary international currents in design. This blending approach applies to the multiple Rooms Hotels they designed in Tbilisi, Khazbegi, and Kokhta, where they combined massive objects of stone or wood with soft accents, artifacts, and other treasures—a style the pair have dubbed “poetic brutalism.” Their designs and interiors have been featured in The New York Times Style Magazine, W Magazine, Architectural Digest, dezeen, and Surface, among many others.
