What is being hailed as the most colourful - and most expensive – PR gimmick in the hotel industry, the Hotel Puerta America in Madrid boasts more architects than it has storeys, more style than it has function, and more money than it has brunt. But it’s fabulous.

The amusingly long list of powerhouse collaborators, among them Zaha Hadid, John Pawson, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Australian Marc Newson, bespeak, while obviously talent, even more obviously the glitter of celebrity, and each were rationed a space of the hotel with 100% discretion with which to play. This is what Silken Hotels call the “formal freedom” of the project, the celebratory banner that is very literally written all over the hotel - for scrawled in as many languages as can possibly be crammed onto one façade are lines from Paul Eluard’s famous surrealist poem “Freedom” that aptly reveres the notion of not freedom gained but freedom inscribed. This is about architects making marks.

Structural integrity was not on the cards – while each floor boasts the same layout, that’s the extent of any continuity or similarity. It seems the opposite was desired, with an almost stereotypically motley crew of designers presenting on each of their respective canvasses their own distinct genre pieces. There is the fluid, the modernist, the baroque, the oriental, the minimalist, the techno-savvy.

Opening its doors to the public late last year, the 75 million Euro venture took over 3 years to build, and it has 308 standard rooms, 22 junior suites, 12 suites, 12 floors, and 19 designers. Which meant that even the carpark, designed by Teresa Sapey, is couture. She transformed the customary damp and dark underground realm into a vibrant, kinetic space with red and orange murals depicting flight. Yes, it’s superficial, but that’s not a dirty word. The Hotel Puerta celebrates surface, and its power and popularity reminds us how dangerous it is to underestimate the persuasiveness of a good layer of paint, and a good surface show of multicultural and multidisciplinary harmony.

Firstly, the façade: Jean Nouvel (who is also responsible for the penthouse and the twelfth floor suites) has again proven his eye for beautiful and unique façades with a chequered array of vinyl panels like a scattered rainbow spectrum. This introduces the pastiche that continues indoors. Like his universally acclaimed L’Institut Du Monde Arabe, The Hotel Puerta’s façade looks like rich wallpaper, or at least a compiled stack of colour swatches for the interior designer. The panels are functional too, a clever system of window screens that modulate incoming light. The poem must be utterly bewildering to the passing city dwellers and tourists; but it’s a fun, play school phantasmagoria, and it’s as contagious as it is colourful.

Veteran Norman Foster’s second floor personifies the elegance of high-tech and was inspired by the palette of materials of the late Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. In the lobby, a Chillida sculpture greets the guests, while the walls are covered with off-white leather, a solution that conveys a sense of privacy and dampens the awareness of the chaos outside. Hallways, at intervals, appear like backlit translucent glass lanterns, and link the hallway to the bath and bedroom, which also house backlit onyx. Lines are clean and uncluttered; the use of rich oak floorboards, glass, and white leather together render acoustic sensations acute, but ensure stridency has no place here.

And some rooms stand out more than others. Hadid’s dominion, the entire first floor, captures charm in terror; it’s a beautiful room that can’t be for the nightmare prone. With her famous linear fluidity she creates a liquid space where floor, wall and furniture melt together, creating an unaccommodating but intriguing still life vortex. From a piece of LG Hi-Macs, a strong yet ductile material that perfectly fits Hadid’s sinuous yet unrelenting designs, emerges the bed, the desk, and other furniture, without sunder. Issuing from the wall, they give the impression that they could slowly sink back into the wall at the guest’s command. And it’s all, like magnesium burning, vision-impairingly white. The lighting created for the doors is a feat, with a strip of LEDs that illuminate messages on the doors. This way, guests can, from inside, indicate whether they want breakfast to be served, the room to be tidied, not to be bothered, or any repairs to be made.

Up the elevator four floors, are fifth floor furnishers, Spanish fashion house Victorio and Lucchino. They remind us that when we’re travelling, we’re bound to want a comfortable, textured sanctuary, especially from the outside bustle of the Avenida de America, one of the busiest access roads to Madrid’s city centre. In the hall, the walls are lacquered black, the armchairs are upholstered in velvet and the floors are clad with distressed black stone. Two white marble sphinxes from the designers’ personal collection rise hieratically in the middle of the lobby. And, unlike most other rooms, Victorio and Lucchino chose a classical, practical layout with the desk right next to the bed.

The fourth floor showcases Plasma Studio, a nascent London-based experimental firm with a highly geometric edge. Touring the lobby and halls is like walking through a roughly cut gemstone that casts infinite kaleidoscopic perspectives. Large pieces of stainless steel are used with a play of different coloured lights emanating from LED strips, which reflect light over superfine bars of methacrylate. Ingeniously, in the bedrooms, the same steel gives shape to the shower, the bathtub, the headboard of the bed and the desk, which fold after one another, all arranged along the same wall. Despite the jagged and fractured aggressiveness, it is one continuous piece of steel that flows naturally.

Some rooms are less successful. Scottish architect Katherine Findlay’s eighth floor is reminiscent of Hadid’s design; Findlay uses a monochromatic ivory palette to create an austere space where, she vacuously states, guests can meditate, “dream and listen to the wind.” In place of traditional walls Findlay has only curtains, and this - the use of flimsy, gauzy fabric - apparently conveys, as Silken Hotels publicise, a “highly feminine” space. This is the only downside to the project: it resorts to stereotyping as a celebration of diversity. The same can be said of Arata Isozaki’s tenth floor, where predictable Ikea-Japanese furnishings pay little contribution to the inventiveness of the project.

But perhaps we expect too much from such an illustrious group of designers, assuming that, joining forces, their power would be unstoppable (or so beautiful we wouldn’t want to stop them). The verdict? There’s been a lot of talk about this hotel. Most guests appear incredibly impressed, while some report back with typical vacation horror stories, although perhaps exclusive to the Hotel Puerta are the stories that involve multiple room changes for a remotely practical room where you can at least find the bed (instead of mistaking it for a bathtub, or a postmodern sculpture). Like a big-budget Hollywood movie with an amazing all-star cast but a little less depth in the plot, the Hotel Puerta is an outlandishly fun architectural wonderland that, in the end, simply relishes the colours of design, art and architecture. And, obviously, that’s where the money is. +

Previous The Jean Nouvel facade of the Hotel Puerta America in northern Madrid.

From top Handmade terracotta tiles enhance a highly geometric space in David Chipperfield’s third floor bedroom.

Nouvel’s bedroom creates a whole world where floor, ceiling and wall beguile with seemingly three-dimensional tactile surfaces.

John Pawson decided to use wood for the reception area to create space in a small area - he had just 150m2 to play with, in comparison with the 1200m2 for each floor. The sinuous lines of the panels disguise the reception desk and lifts.

Victorio and Lucchino’s bedrooms boast Sergio Cruz artworks and a plethora of textiles to create an elaborate sense of detail, luxury and high fashion.

Zaha Hadid’s first floor captures terror in the science of fluidity and sinuousness. This pitch black room pushes the limits of materiality in having the bed, desk and other furniture emerge from the same piece of LG Hi-Macs.

Javier Mariscal and Fernando Salas’ eleventh floor lobby. Marsical’s iridescent cactus sculpture, made of coloured Corian standing on a double platform of stainless steel and iron, immediately greets the guests with fun warmth.

Italian architect Teresa Sapey’s wonderful underground carpark. The simple iconographic motif - a pointing finger, a man running with a dog - comprises a mixture of words from the same Eluard poem that covers the building’s facade.