In the architecture of Daniel Isern, constructive reason and the emotion of inhabited space coexist in harmony. An architect trained at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, where he also specialized in architectural rehabilitation, he began his professional career in 1999 before founding his own studio in Barcelona in 2012. Since then, Isern Associats has built a solid trajectory in the fields of hotel and residential design.
His practice is founded on an essential principle: the balance between technical precision and human sensitivity. Each project arises from a rigorous reading of the place and its inhabitants, but also from an intuition capable of transforming functionality into experience. Isern maintains that a hotel must “work like a clock,” without failures or artifices, yet it must also move and inspire — it must tell a story through light, texture, and silence.
Since its founding, the studio has developed projects acclaimed for their conceptual coherence and material excellence, including the Hotel OHLA Eixample in Barcelona, the restoration of Palau Fugit Hotel in Girona, ME by Meliá, the ME Sitges by Meliá, the Áurea Palacio de Correos in Logroño, the Hotel Bellville in Paris, and Hotel Atzavara in Santa Susanna. In each of them, architecture and interior design merge into a single narrative where timelessness and serenity prevail over fashion and excess.
The work of Isern Associats has been nominated for the WAN Awards (2014 and 2018) and received an honourable mention at the Catalunya Construcció Awards 2018, recognitions that endorse both its technical rigour and its design sensitivity. In parallel, Daniel Isern directs the Postgraduate Programme in Hotel Design at Escola Sert, part of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), from where he promotes a contemporary and demanding vision of hospitality design.
Composed of a multidisciplinary team of architects, interior designers, and product designers, the studio works through the seamless integration of architecture, light, and materiality. Its language is serene, tactile, and precise: an architecture that does not impose but accompanies; that seeks comfort through proportion, detail, and authenticity.
In each work, Daniel Isern reminds us that true beauty lies in the discretion of well-crafted things, in the harmony between what is seen and what is felt. This vision defines the new Hotel Marina Cambrils by URH Hotels, where his Mediterranean sensibility —clear, sober, and luminous— transforms functionality into atmosphere and space into a lasting emotion.