A new hotel in Indonesia is attempting to claim the title of "the narrowest in the world." But its creator says the project isn't just about breaking a world record, but about bringing international attention to his small hometown.
Ary Indra grew up in Salatiga, Central Java. After training as an architect and building a career in Jakarta and Singapore, he felt the call to return home to Salatiga and put his knowledge to use there.
There he found an unwanted plot of land, which no one was willing to develop due to its unusual size. Now it is home to PituRooms , a seven-room hotel (Pitu means "seven" in Javanese) that measures only 2.8 meters wide.
The building has five floors, and each of the seven rooms accommodates a double bed and a small bathroom with a shower and toilet. Each room has a different atmosphere thanks to the artwork and local interiors.
“I want people to experience Salatiga in a new way,” Indra told CNN. “I own, design, and manage PituRooms with my own team. It’s become my new platform for creating a new kind of tourism that involves local communities.”.
Ary Indra is the founder of the PituRooms hotel in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia.
Salatiga is 500 km southeast of Jakarta, and is mostly unknown to foreigners, who instead head to Yogyakarta, Surabaya or the nearby island of Bali for their holidays.
Indra told CNN that PituRooms, which opened in December 2022, had "only five percent" non-Indonesian guests.
But within Indonesia, Indra says, Salatiga is known as a tolerant city with good food, good infrastructure, and a good quality of life. It was a popular weekend getaway for the Dutch during the colonial era.
Indra says most Indonesians think of Salatiga as a nice place to retire, but her hope is that PituRooms will be the first of many projects that help outsiders see that Salatiga is much more than just slow living.
"Aside from the technical difficulties, the biggest challenge was the typical mentality of the hotel sector, accustomed to superlatives: the biggest, the tallest, the most luxurious. Here we are the narrowest," Indra explains to Dezeen , an architecture blog.
We worked hard to turn this limitation into our strongest selling point, which is that it's a built study of the microspace, and guests can experience the possibility of living and choreographing their movement in a 'just right' space.".
The city is at the foot of Mount Merbabu, which PituRooms guests can see from their rooms.
In addition to the hotel rooms, there is a rooftop restaurant that locals can enjoy, and PituRooms plans to host events and art exhibitions.
Source: https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/
