What do you get when you cross Steampunk ingenuity with medieval folklore?
Answer: A giant mechanical dragon ‘stork’, soaring through the room with a floating bed suspended from its mouth like a baby bundle, of course…
Once upon a time last year, when Bruce Rosenbaum was a featured speaker at the Steampunk Railway to the Moon Mount Washington Cog Railway event, nestled in the picturesque White Mountains of central New Hampshire, he was invited to stay at the classic-Americana Adventure Suites hotel in North Conway, NH.
At the time, owners Al Doucet and Kathy Brassill-Doucet were considering a Steampunk makeover for their 2-Person suite titled The Dragon’s Lair.
They wanted Bruce and his wife Melanie to experience the space and come up with ideas of what might be possible in taking the room’s décor to the next level with a Steampunk kinetic sculpture.
“In my mind, when you laid on the floating bed you were in the story, the sculpture had to be the focal point of the room. Why not a Dragonstork?” said Rosenbaum. “Just relaxing on the round swinging bed, we had this feeling of renewal and rebirth being in the room. It’s like a bed a kid might want to sleep in and dream. So, from that we came up with the idea of fusing a dragon with a stork – and it’s carrying the bed as a loving baby bundle!”
After hearing of this whimsical idea inspired by the Dragon’s Lair concept, Al and Kathy announced they would be removing the drop ceiling and constructing a vaulted area in the room.
“When we heard about the higher ceiling, I knew we could also bring kinetic movement to the piece,” Bruce said. “While the dragon’s body stays stationary, the head pivots with the movement of the bed.”
ModVic, LLC worked with Franklin County, MA metal artist, Jon Bander – who already had a dragon’s head in a preliminary design stage and was thrilled to now have a project creating the entire dragon’s body.
“It was serendipitous to connect with Jon given the theme of the hotel room,” said Rosenbaum. “I had no idea he had been exploring this subject. The dragon’s full body from nose to tail is close to 8 ft.”
Bruce said ModVic also enjoyed working with Ethan Griswold, a student at Pathfinder Vocational School in Palmer, MA, who enhanced the sculpture with electronics and lighting in the chest plate area, the tail and behind the wings – creating an inner glow as well as visual depth and separation from the ceiling.
The Result: A Steampunk project that honors the past, present, and puts couples in a mystical setting to reimagine what’s next. It is quickly becoming the most popular of the hotel’s themed room options.
Built in the mid-1950’s and originally named the Cross Country Motel, it was one of the first motels on the North Conway “strip”, which sits just south of Mount Washington, on the eastern edge of New Hampshire among the famous presidential mountain range.
As local innovators, ownership reinvented the motel’s vision in the 1980s, renamed it the Presidential Waterbed Motel, thus becoming one of the first “themed” hotels of its time – offering a waterbed and Jacuzzi in each room.
Today, it is called Adventure Suites, and remains listed as one of the top 10 theme hotels in the world.
