How We Turned a Zoku Hotel Room into an Escape Room

Two companies, one shared instinct

Sherlocked and Zoku had been admiring each other from a distance for years before we worked together. Both companies obsess over the same question: how does a space make you feel? Zoku answers it with design, packing an entire flat into 24 square metres and making the furniture do double duty. We answer it with story and puzzle. We just hadn't found the time to put those instincts in the same room.

Then the pandemic gave us the time neither of us had asked for. Sherlocked closed its doors under lockdown. Zoku's occupancy, usually near 100%, dropped fast. Francine Boon, our Head of Development, and Victor van Doorn, our CEO, sat down with Veerle Donders, Zoku's Concept and Brand Director, and started sketching what became the Escape Loft.

Designing a game you can't see

Most escape rooms nudge you toward the next clue. Light, sound, a mark on the wall that doesn't belong. None of that was allowed here. Guests who just wanted to sleep in their loft couldn't have puzzle furniture staring back at them.

So the game hid inside the room's own logic. The symbols we used matched the existing signage in the loft. The puzzles ran through the sliding staircase, the washing line, the storage nobody opens on a one-night stay. At check-in, you got a sealed envelope. Open it, and the loft you thought you understood turned out to hide a second layer entirely.

Getting there took a lot of Post-its, literally. Every puzzle in the Escape Loft started life as a cut-up, folded, taped-at-an-angle Post-it note, tested and re-tested until it held up from exactly the right spot in the room. Rapid prototyping wasn't a nice idea for us, it's how we build everything.

Forty five minutes, after 5pm

The result: a roughly 45 minute adventure available to guests after 5pm, built entirely inside the loft they were already staying in. Play it, and at the end you'd find a small prize in the safe, plus a discount to come play one of our longer games in Amsterdam.

For Zoku, it meant guests actually discovered the details they'd built into the design. For us, it meant a new kind of introduction to people who'd never stepped into an escape room before.

Where the Escape Loft is now

The Escape Loft ran as a pilot inside a handful of Zoku Amsterdam's lofts and isn't part of the current lineup. What stuck with us is the idea underneath it: a space doesn't need a renovation to become something new. Sometimes it just needs someone to look at what's already there and ask a different question.

If that kind of collaboration sounds like your kind of project, get in touch. We'd love to build the next one with you.