Moxy Kaunas Center, Lithuania
Interwar modernism gets a playful new chapter in Lithuania’s second city
Why DNA Hotels Loves It
● G. Natkevičius & Partners took their cues from Kaunas’ celebrated interwar modernist architecture, translating rounded corners, rhythmic pilasters, textured plaster, and strong geometric volumes into a contemporary hotel.
● Raw concrete, blackened metal, timber, leather, graffiti, and local symbols give the interiors an industrial energy that feels distinctly connected to Kaunas rather than standard Moxy styling.
● Opened in 2020 as the first Moxy in the Baltic States, the building achieved BREEAM Excellent certification, proving that playful, affordable hospitality can take architecture and sustainability seriously.
Modernism, Continued
Kaunas has one of Europe’s great collections of interwar modernist architecture. So when G. Natkevičius & Partners were asked to design a new-build hotel in the city centre, pretending that architectural history wasn’t there would have been a missed opportunity. Moxy Kaunas Center doesn’t copy its neighbours. Instead, it borrows their vocabulary. Rounded exterior walls, a steady rhythm of openings, pronounced vertical pilasters, a cantilever floating above the glazed ground floor, and heavily textured render reference the buildings constructed during Kaunas’ remarkable interwar period. Even the plaster was deliberately applied with a visible hand-drawn stroke, giving the new façade some of the irregularity and depth of its older surroundings. It is contemporary architecture having a conversation with the city rather than trying to impersonate it.
Rough Around the Edges
Inside, things become considerably less restrained. Exposed concrete, black and rusted metal, leather, timber, colourful furniture, carpets, handmade lighting, oversized photography, and specially commissioned graffiti create the deliberately informal atmosphere associated with Moxy. But look more closely and Kaunas keeps appearing. A bison, motifs derived from the city’s historic symbols, local expressions, and visual references that may mean considerably more to residents than visitors are scattered throughout the public spaces. It’s a smart detail. Instead of decorating a global hotel concept with generic “local inspiration”, the designers have hidden pieces of Kaunas inside it.
Check In at the Bar
There isn’t much patience here for the conventions of traditional business hotels. Reception and the 24-hour cocktail bar are essentially the same thing, surrounded by an open-plan lobby designed for eating, drinking, working, meeting, or doing several of those things simultaneously. That informality is central to Moxy’s formula, but the architecture helps it work particularly well here. The glazed ground floor behaves almost like an extension of the street, while exposed structural elements and raw finishes prevent the space from becoming overly polished. This is less grand hotel lobby, more urban living room.
Small Rooms, Smart Ideas
The rooms follow the same logic. They are compact and deliberately stripped of unnecessary furniture, replacing conventional wardrobes with open metal structures incorporating hanging space, mirrors, lighting, and foldaway work surfaces. Large windows bring daylight into otherwise efficient spaces, while walk-in showers, smart televisions, and carefully integrated lighting cover the practicalities. Nobody comes to Moxy for a marble-clad suite with a separate drawing room. The trade-off is obvious: less private space upstairs, considerably more life downstairs.
Built for a New Kaunas
The architecture’s environmental performance is less immediately visible but arguably more important.
The six-storey building achieved a BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating, placing energy efficiency and environmental considerations into the project from the outset rather than treating them as a marketing add-on. That feels particularly appropriate in Kaunas. The city is rightly celebrated for the progressive architecture it created between the wars. Moxy doesn’t attempt to recreate that golden age, but takes its underlying optimism—the idea that architecture should respond to contemporary life—and moves it forward.
Why It Works
Moxy Kaunas Center could easily have been another international lifestyle hotel dropped into another European city. G. Natkevičius & Partners made it more interesting. By taking the proportions, curves, textures, and rhythms of Kaunas’ extraordinary interwar modernism and translating them rather than copying them, they created a building that belongs to its surroundings. Inside, concrete, metal, graffiti, local symbols, and the bar-as-reception concept loosen everything up. It may carry the Moxy name, but underneath the global branding there is enough architecture, humour, and Kaunas character to give this one an identity of its own.
