If you’re on a diet, look away now! It’s a new year, and like many others, I’m doing the obligitory resolution to eat in a more healthy manner. However, the exact moment that you start denying yourself sugary snacks, you start dreaming about cake. At least I do. Or to be more accurate, I’m dreaming about the edible creations of Carles Mampel at Bubo.

I found Bubo last year whilst mindlessly wandering around the back streets of Barcelona. The Bubo shop is more akin to an art gallery than a shop selling cakes and petit fours, which is fitting as the edible artworks created by Carles Mampel are beautifully designed statues of taste. Seriously, it’s almost a crime to eat these things!

If you ever find yourself in Barcelona, skip the tourist traps and head over to Bubo to stuff yourself with beautifully designed award winning cakes. Even if you’re not hungry, just go and feed your eyes.

Visit Bubo

I’m hitting the street of Barcelona for a few days. So there won’t be any posts for a while, but I’ll be back with a Barcelona report on my return. Hopefully I’ll be checking out some of the best new hotels, restaurants and bars that the city has to offer – all in the name of ‘Things of Random Coolness’ of course. It’s a tough job, but somebody has got to do it!

Absolute discretion provided to lovers. Newly renovated & styled La França Hotel in Barcelona is said to be for “couples”, if you get what I mean. The discreet and stylish interiors are set to provide lovers with a romantic hideaway in one of Europe’s greatest cities.

It certainly looks beautiful inside (the parking lot even has curtains), but the best part are the prices, starting from €42 up to €88 for the grand suite. I’m off to Barcelona next month, and I’m paying a lot more for a standard room in another hotel, than La França charges for their grand suite. Hmmm….Perhaps it might be time to change my booking?

Find out more at La França.

Update: The beautiful interior design work at La França was done by Lázaro Rosa Violán.

Don’t Worry, I haven’t developed a soup fetish! I know I posted about another design soup bowl the other day, and now I’m about to do it again, but it’s just a coincidence! It seems we’re on the edge of a new trend for designer soup bowls. And the Topography Soup Plate by Kyouei Design is a corker! Plus the wonderfully disjointed english blurb they have on the site is like somekind of crazy beat poetry:

please pour the soup into this plate. mountain range and a lake are completed. and the bottom of a lake appears when you eat the soup. please enjoy the taste, the landscape and topography of the plate. when you use it as a salad dish, it becomes a forest. you can create a landscape on your very own table.

See more work by Kyouei Design.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week… but I’ve been skipping around the country for the past few days. The highlight was catching Interpol play live on Monday night.

Also, I tried out a new design concept hotel in Birmingham called Nite Nite. The hotel is a boutique budget hotel that takes it’s inspiration from Japanese capsule hotels. Essentially, your room amounts to what can only be described as a luxury prison cell. That may sound awful, but it’s actually a great experience. The tiny windowless room which is kitted out with a 42 inch plama televisions and a high-spec wet-room area can be completely controlled from a star-trek style neon control panel on the wall. It’s what I imagine a cabin on a luxury space travel trip to the moon would be like at some point in the future.

If you’re not claustraphobic and you ever find yourself in Birmingham, UK and need a room for the night in the centre of the city, you should definitely check out Nite Nite.

Christian Lacroix does it again. Everytime I visit Paris, I always stay in the Christian Lacroix decorated Hotel du Petit Moulin. It’s a beautiful designer boutique hotel hidden away in the streets of Le Marais, where each room has a uniquely different design and theme.

It seems the French fashion designer has now done the same thing again with Hotel Le Bellechasse. Apparently, lacroix was given carte blanche for the decoration of this new luxury hotel, which, much like the Hotel du Petit Moulin, has resulted in the 34 rooms of this new boutique hotel being a heady mix of motif and pattern with layered images of insects, astrological symbols, Jules Verne scenes, checkers, toile de Jouy, with texture, mosaic and a masculine use of colour. Looks like I’ll have to plan another trip to my favorite european city to check it out for myself.

Find out more at the Hotel Le Bellechasse website.

You can have it in any colour as long as it’s white! Seeing as my current travel adventures are over, I think it’s time to start planning new ones. I’ve never been to Brussels and The White Hotel gives me the option of choosing a white room, or a super-white room, which intrigues me. Plus, each room contains a work made by a top belgian designer, so that should satisfy the design-whore in me.

Find out more about The White Hotel.

Hola España! Bonjour France! With all the endless rain we’ve been getting so far this summer in the UK, Miss Random Fashion Coolness and I have decided to hit the south of Spain/France for the summer. So normal Things of Random Coolness transmissions will be momentarily interrupted until we reach the Mediterranean and set up base camp.

If any of the Spanish/French readers have any good recommendations on things to see/do/eat/etc, please let me know.

A gallery where you can spent the night. That is what a hotel in one of the Berlin’s most exciting neighborhoods is often called. The Arte Luise Kunsthotel offers almost 50 rooms, each one decorated by a renowned artist.

Check out the rooms to see all the individual room concepts. There’s some interesting themes going on.

If you ever find yourself in Berlin, it might be worth checking into the Arte Luise Kunsthotel.

The prefect hotel for the design-obbessed traveller. While I was messing about with uploading the Valencian hotel photos to flickr, I found a bunch of photos from a recent trip to Paris. We stayed in the Hotel du Petit Moulin, a boutique hotel kitted out by Christian Lacroix. The hotel from the outside looks like a 17th century Boulangerie

If you’re ever in Paris, I can’t recommend the Hotel du Petit Moulin enough! It’s not outrageously expensive for Paris, and it’s perfectly located in the very hip Marais area of Paris. Each room has a seperate design theme, so it gives you a reason to keep going back to Paris to stay in each one (I’ve been back twice so far – so they’ve got me hooked!)

Check out the photos of the hotel that I’ve uploaded to Flickr. The design whores amongst you will spot the Timorous Beasties wall coverings, Deborah Bowness wallpaper and the classic Arne Jacobsen Egg & Swan chairs.

Although, the word on the street is that the new Hotel Amour is the boutique hotel du jour for Paris. I’ll post more on this hotel if they ever get back to me (perhaps their too cool to “do” email!)

For reservations, see Hotel du Petit Moulin.