There was a time, not so long ago, when sipping on a whisky in a hotel lobby after midnight was a pastime best left to nighthawks. But since the mid-1990s a new wave of startups have gone from mixing nightclubs with plush design pieces to building creative hubs that bring in local artists, designers and foodies – none more so than Ace Hotel Shoreditch, where you can buy a bouquet of flowers or pick up a rare vinyl record.

The boutique hotel’s latest move has been to invite the Joshua Light Show, an award-winning collective of multimedia artists known for working on Midnight Cowboy and performing at Woodstock, to create a psychedelic installation in The 100 Room that can be seen by revellers passing by at street level.

“Ace Hotel asked us if we might create a light-show environment as an accompaniment to Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's new feature film, Inherent Vice,” explains JLS’s music director Nick Hallett. “So what the light show does is improvise to music, which means we listen and respond to what we hear, and our tools allow us to manipulate light in real time.” The effect is deliciously chaotic.

Recently we featured the Ace Hotel in an article exploring how hotels are shifting their focus from merely being accommodation for travellers to fully immersing themselves in the locality. Read our full Travel Report in the latest issue of the Protein Journal.

Photography by Caitlin Mogridge