All's well that ends well - the Hollywood story also applies to the "never-ending story" of one of Hamburg's best-known construction brownfields. After more than a decade, residents and visitors of St. Georg district were liberated from the sight of an enormous building pit seemingly abandoned to its fate on Adenauerallee. From an urban development point of view, the wait was well worth it, as the renowned Hamburg studio Störmer Murphy and Partners developed a concept for a combined hotel and residential utilisation for the area - now one of the architectural highlights in the trendy district.

The congenial solution to the demanding urban planning requirements: A 55-metre (180-ft.)-high residential tower, which offers a total of 113 residential units on 17 floors, rests visually on a seven-floor block which today is home to the Courtyard by Marriott hotel with 277 rooms. The two buildings, which are intertwined in an almost "Siamese" manner, pick up on the high-rise development of the Adenauerallee and at the same time create a harmonious transition to the adjacent, significantly lower neighbourhood development through the lower cross-beam. The architects sensitively integrated the new building complex into the urban planning context not only by the building structures and heights, but also by the design of the facade: "The residential tower with its facade of light-coloured natural stone surfaces, harmoniously complemented by vertically laid clinker brick slips and balconies with printed glass balustrades, is a landmark visible from afar," Holger Jaedicke, partner of Störmer Murphy and Partners, emphasises. "The choice of colours and materials allowed us to create a reference to the neighbouring buildings, especially to the travertine facade of the opposite heritage-listed administration building from the 1950s."

For architectural enthusiasts, it is therefore worth taking a closer look at the outer shell of the two structures: The upper floors of the residential tower are adorned with small-format travertine slabs, some of which are cut at an angle, giving it a lively as well as "light" expression. The colour-coordinated architectural clinker brick slips by Ströher, based on the Product 237 "austerrauch", which clad the facade of the timber-framed building, provide an exciting contrast. On the one hand, the material appearance and the subtle colour nuances of the clinker "ground" the transverse structure of the building twin; on the other hand, the ultra-slim long format 400 x 35 mm (15,8 x 1,3 in.) in combination with the unconventional vertical laying of the facade creates a fascinating elegance in the form of a "pinstripe" effect.