25 hours Hotel, HafenCity

Location: Hamburg

Design: Stephen Williams Associates

While assembling entire buildings from shipping containers can be hugely impressive, some designers and architects have chosen to use them in a more subtle way. For the 25 hours Hotel in Hamburg's HafenCity district, for exaqmple, architect Stephen Williams Associates used shipping containers to create an industrial aesthetic inspired by iconoclastic Manchester nightclub The Hacienda.

On the ground floor of the hotel, Williams and his team left most of the ceiling works exposed and painted yellow loading-bay-style graphics on to floors of black rubberized concrete. A meeting room is separated from the lobby by a wall made from the side of a reclaimed shipping container. At the touch of a button the wall can be raised electronically to give access to the meeting space.A shipping container's sides are also used to create a 'tough' aesthetic in the gym and sauna on the top floor, which also has a skylight window that opens to the elements. 'It's open at the top so that when you come out of the sauna you're standing in the open air,' says Williams. If it rains 'it rains in there, so it feels quite tough - not like a spa at all'.