Telegraph Hotel / Neri&Hu Design And Research Office

Architects: Neri&Hu Design and Research Office
Area: 28,000 m²
Year: 2025
Photography: Neri&Hu Design and Research Office
Lead Architects: Lyndon Neri, Rossana Hu
Design Team: Neri&Hu Design and Research Office
Materials: Bolnisi Tuff Stone; Travertine; Board-formed Concrete; Glass; Blackened Metal; Dark Timber; Green Marble
Client: Silk Road Group
City/Location: Tbilisi
Country: Georgia

The Telegraph Hotel in Tbilisi represents a careful architectural negotiation between preservation and reinvention, transforming a long-abandoned Soviet-era post office into a contemporary hospitality destination. Designed by Neri&Hu, the 239-room hotel retains the building’s monumental modernist facade while introducing a porous ground level that reconnects the structure with the city. A central courtyard functions as the organizational and social heart of the project, encouraging movement, visibility, and public engagement. Throughout the interiors, a restrained palette of stone, concrete, metal, and timber establishes continuity with the existing structure while allowing individual spaces to develop distinct identities. Transparent partitions and layered circulation dissolve conventional boundaries between public and private zones, reflecting the building’s historic role as a place of exchange. As part of a broader urban redevelopment effort around Republic Square, the project positions adaptive reuse as both a cultural and urban strategy, contributing to Tbilisi’s evolving architectural and social landscape.

One of our favorite details is the way we chose to highlight, rather than conceal, the traces of time when dealing with adaptive reuse projects. This idea is particularly evident in a recent project, The Telegraph Hotel, which once served as Tbilisi’s central post office and telegraph office. Our transformative intervention is not an act of restoration but of “critical reinterpretation.” The approach is guided by Svetlana Boym’s concept of “reflective nostalgia,” which favors the fragmentary, the incomplete, and the poetic over a mythologized reconstruction of the past. Instead of plastering over the cracks of time, the design highlights them, creating a layered dialogue between the building’s raw, existing concrete structure and elegant new insertions. This method honors memory not by embalming the building as a relic, but by allowing its history to resonate through its new life.
Interview with Lyndon Neri & Rossana Hu of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office

Telegraph hotel / neri&hu design and research office

The transformation of the former central post office into the Telegraph Hotel marks a pivotal moment in Tbilisi’s ongoing dialogue with its Soviet architectural legacy. For Neri&Hu, the commission offered an opportunity to engage directly with a structure deeply embedded in the city’s collective memory, once serving as a vital conduit for communication in an era before digital connectivity. Rather than treating the building as a relic, the architects approached it as an urban artifact capable of renewed relevance through careful spatial and material interventions.

Located along Rustaveli Avenue, the building’s original 1964 design by Georgian architects Lado Meskhishvili and Teimuraz Mikashavidze was defined by its rigid geometry and monumental cornice clad in local Bolnisi tuff. This distinctive facade has been meticulously preserved, maintaining visual continuity with nearby civic landmarks. In contrast, the ground level has been reimagined as an open and transparent threshold, where floor-to-ceiling glazing reveals a sequence of public programs arranged around a lush internal courtyard. Restaurants, a library, and social spaces unfold with minimal physical separation, reinforcing visual permeability and extending the life of the street into the building.

At the center, the courtyard operates as an urban room, conceived as a contemporary piazza animated by greenery, informal seating, and an open-air bar. Materials traditionally associated with exterior environments, including travertine flooring and concrete surfaces, blur distinctions between inside and outside. Board-formed concrete walls echo the facade’s original grid, while exposed beams and columns retain traces of the building’s former life. The restrained palette of blackened metal and dark timber establishes a neutral backdrop, allowing texture and light to shape spatial experience.

Within this framework, individual public venues develop distinct atmospheres through subtle variations in material and color. Walnut veneer defines the library, coffered ceilings and antique mirrors shape the Grand Café, and selective use of green leather, marble, and metal accents provides a unifying chromatic thread across the hotel. Guest circulation mirrors the logic of the public spaces, with corridors conceived as interior streets and rooms organized around the courtyard and a secondary atrium. Transparent partitions of fluted glass and metal structures integrate storage, lighting, and services while maintaining openness and flexibility.

The Telegraph Hotel forms part of a larger redevelopment led by Silk Road Group, aimed at reactivating the area surrounding Republic Square and reshaping its perception within the city. In this context, the project stands as an example of adaptive reuse that balances historical responsibility with contemporary urban life, positioning architecture as a medium through which past and present continue to communicate.