The realization of a dream that became a reality, the Indigo Hotel & Spa today stands at No. 105 Ladrilleros, Puerto Natales in the Chilean Patagonia, and first opened its doors to the world in 2006. Built on one bank of the Puerto Natales channel, on the inlet known as Ultima Esperanza (“Last Hope”) at the entrance to the Torres del Paine National Park, this substantial six storey building, offering 29 rooms and a Spa on the top floor, came into being in 1996. This was the year in which publicist and rock climber Hernán Jofré purchased an old wooden house on the Puerto Natales coastal highway – today the Indigo Patagonia Restaurant and Lounge – and converted it into a pizzeria and hostel which was later to become this designer hotel.

The Hotel is an architectural work of art, which blends in with its amazing natural surroundings, thanks to the efforts of its owner, architect Sebastián Irarrázaval and the decorators and partners of Jofré, Ana Ibáñez and Olivier Potart, who were responsible for remodeling this turn of the century house and building the whole of the new section out of concrete clad in tin.

Architect Irarrázaval designed the complex around three concepts: firstly, allowing the traveler to discover the building as one discovers a new place – not all at once, but a little at a time; secondly, to bring out some elements of the building’s previous character such as a kind of provincial atmosphere, far from noisy, and thirdly, to draw a very clear distinction between the intimacy of the bedrooms and the monumental proportions of the common areas. He used materials that were available in the town such as treated timber facing the coast and painted corrugated iron sheets facing towards the street, together with a simple building shape which occupies the whole site and a regular, rhythmical distribution of windows. In order to emphasize the intimacy of the bedrooms, each enclosure features a layer of wood that incorporates the beds, bathrooms, drapes and windows. On the other hand, the common areas are mostly made up of vertical spaces, in which a lattice with three thousand eucalypts rods covers the building from top to bottom. The external and internal surfaces are decorated in themes drawn from local iconography, using graphical forms involving containers and ships, thereby paying tribute to Navimag, the only ship that berths every Thursday bringing provisions and voices from the far south.

In the Hotel everything revolves around the design, aimed at satisfying the tastes of an exclusive and avant-garde public. Some of the pieces of furniture were designed by the hotel’s decorators and manufactured in Puerto Natales, while the rest were brought from Santiago. The most outstanding of its rooms, the Indigo suite, has a fireplace together with a simple, modern bathtub in the center of the room which invites you to take a bath against the backdrop of the fjord of Última Esperanza. But the relaxation does not end here. On the top floor there is a spa with three open air hydro-massage pools looking out over the Paine massif. And if being cut off from the world isn’t enough, the Hotel offers the latest in Wi-Fi technology.

So, now we know that in the extreme South, luxury is clothed in indigo...

Indigo Hotel & Spa
Ladrilleros 105, Puerto Natales, Patagonia, Chile
Telephone: (61) 41360.
www.indigopatagonia.com