New angles:
A detail from the
W Mexico City’s
intimate communal
“living room” as
designed by
Studio GAIA
Thanks to the new boutique hotel
boom, wireless Internet and cushy beds aren’t the only
must-haves this season. Today’s discerning guests want a little
architectural pizzazz for their buck.
“Customers know and expect more now in terms of design,” notes
Stacy Shoemaker, senior editor for New York City-based Hospitality
Design magazine, “and hotels have had to step up.”
Boutiques, of course, are leading the pack, enlisting the
design world’s sharpest talents for the next wave of chic
properties. M&C rounds up and interrogates the new
confectioners, whose sugary visions are turning the hotel world on
its head.
Deborah Berke & Partners Architects LLP
New York City-based architect Deborah Berke cringes at the term
“hotel designer.” Since 1982, her firm has been helming projects
residential, commercial and institutional alike. Her team’s first
engagement in the hospitality arena last year, however, has earned
her the false title more than once.
“What we found
hidden in its awfulness
were some great
spatial opportunities.”
Deborah Berke
The mislabelers can be forgiven, perhaps, in light of just
how sizable a stir the James Hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz., made when
it opened, adding more than a splash of bold color to the
oppressively neutral desert hotelscape.
“It’s so vibrant and beautiful out West,” enthuses Steven
Brockman, senior designer and colorist for the project, whose bold
blues, yellows and reds have earned the James a far-reaching
reputation as a mischievously sexy desert maverick. “Most of the
hotels you see there are these muted, adobelike buildings. We
really wanted to take advantage of what was around us.”
Paying homage to the area’s big sky and generous light,
Brockman arranged for fiery touches such as the red bedside chair
“It’s supposed to make the guest think of sex,” he says. (It
worked. Travel + Leisure magazine ranked the property
America’s sexiest resort last year.) All the color, however, Berke
and company are quick to point out, is in service of a larger
purpose the space.
“We’re not decorators,” she says, with more than a whiff of
dismissal in her voice. “We’re architects. We look at elements like
color, form and shape in terms of how they affect the volume of a
space. With the James, we were gutting and remodeling an old hotel
not old as in vintage classic, just old as in bad. But what we
found hidden in its awfulness were some great spatial
opportunities.”
The 200-room James offers a distinctly unboutique-like 10,000
square feet of meeting space. Berke will revisit the hotel world
with the upcoming 21C Wyndham Hotel and Museum in Louisville, Ky.,
which is expected to open by year’s end, as well as her second
James development, opening in Chicago early next year.
Designworks
Pedro Rosario and Annie Falgas, principal partners for Puerto
Rico-based Designworks, have been collaborating since 1999, but
2002 marked their biggest hospitality splash with the 84-room Water
Club. Set on Isla Verde, the whitest beach in San Juan, the
property more than holds it own amid a Ritz-Carlton, an
InterContinental and some criminally lavish condo developments.
“We really wanted the interiors to reflect the sensual
experience of the surrounding area,” says Rosario. In order to
bring the beach indoors without shoveling sand into the lobby,
Rosario and Falgas dressed most of the blue-neon-lit spaces in
gracefully billowing white sheers. Even the 4,834 square feet of
on-site meeting and event space are deliciously tropical.
Guest rooms are equipped with one telescope each, an element
Rosario admits is purely decorative (“I don’t think anyone’s
actually using them,” he notes). Similar accusations could be laid
at the classic jelly bean machines scattered throughout the
property, but functional or no, such details helped earn the Water
Club Lodging Hospitality’s Hippest Hotel Design award in its
opening year.
Other Design Works projects include the recently completed L.G.
Smith restaurant at the Aruba Renaissance Beach Resort & Casino
and Cervantes, a new Spanish-style boutique hotel in Old San Juan,
set to open this November.
Studio GAIA
Soon after Ilan Waisbrod started up this New York City-based design
company (named for his youngest son) in the mid-’90s, his
restaurant and retail projects earned top-notch industry attention
as he shouldered his way into the big awards ceremonies as early as
1996. It was his 2003 input on the W Mexico City, however, that
elevated Waisbrod to young industry royalty.
The 237-room property might be a guest room or two larger than
other boutiques, and it enjoys some more powerful industry
connections, but this W’s famously rich and influential design
leaves little doubt of its class.
Waisbrod’s design integrates the aesthetics of local character
(baked clay), cosmopolitan chic (sleek, glassy lounges) and
quasi-absurd luxury (hammocks in the showers) with elegance and
élan. In the spa facility, with its coolly sophisticated cartoon
murals, Waisbrod offers the rare design template that relies on
something other than pastels and candles. For meetings purposes,
the property offers a shimmering 7,700 square feet of space.
Last year, the minipalace earned the coveted Best Hotel Design
prize at the Golden Key Awards, sponsored by Interior Design and
Hotels magazines.
Waisbrod’s next W opens in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at the end of
2006. Also ahead: swank eateries and lounges in Las Vegas, Mexico
and New York City.
Rockwell Group
Arguably the closest thing the hotel design world has to a
superstar, New York City-based David Rockwell might be America’s
best-known hotel artist, thanks to recent fare such as Manhattan’s
720-room W New York and 270-room W Union Square, as well as
Serafina, the Fellini-inspired restaurant at New York City’s new
pupu platter of design offerings, the 228-room Dream Hotel (also
featuring spaces by David LaChapelle, Mike Zeff and
spiritual/medical guru Deepak Chopra).
Widely acclaimed for its savvy blend of haute and homey,
Rockwell’s firm walks hotel guests just to the outer perimeter of
their notions of design and leaves them there, but never without a
clear view of their starting point. For example: the much-admired,
203-room Alex Hotel opened in 2003 with a Manhattanite minimalism
that somehow never turned harsh. Even the 300-square-foot business
center and 1,000-square-foot meeting room are fresh, sophisticated
and smart enough to get their occupants following suit.
Prepare for this year’s rebirth of the former Carilla Hotel in
Miami Beach as the focal point of Rockwell’s sprawling new
CanyonRanch Living complex.
3rd Uncle
Toronto-based Arriz Hassam, Paul Syme and John Tong partnered up to
form 3rd Uncle five years ago. They didn’t make their entrée into
hospitality design, however, until they were commissioned to work
on Toronto’s Drake Hotel, a 19-room boutique property meant to
become a sort of Plymouth Rock for the artist community fomenting
in the city’s Queen Street West district.
3rd Uncle attempted to funnel all the contradiction, dynamism
and transience of the Drake’s surrounding neighborhood into the
hotel’s character. To do so, and to pay homage to the older
building housing the hotel, Hassam, Syme and Tong used materials
expressly chosen for their propensity to age quickly and
conspicuously. For example, they covered the facade in black steel
a substance that only strengthens as it rusts and made prominent
use of unfinished bronze. After less than one year in business,
Tong boasts, “the Drake is already starting to wear visibly, and
over another winter it’s going to tarnish, which is just what we
want.”
The determinedly and deceptively ragged approach to the Drake
is far from typical for the firm, which has helmed its fair share
of high-end projects. Currently in the works is 3rd Uncle’s
redesign of the theater and rotunda space in the newly renovated
Royal Ontario Museum, as well as several retail projects.
One is silver, the other gold:
Two cool-as-a-cucumber
stations in the Q! spa, by Graft
Graft
Like Gwyneth Paltrows of the design industry, the people behind
Graft (based in Berlin, with a satellite office in New York City)
are young, elegant, powerful and owe much of their fame to Brad
Pitt. It was the flashy number that partners Lars Krueckeberg,
Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit did on the celebrity’s private
residence that first won the attention of developers of Q!, the
chic Berlin hotel that Graft designed to giddy reception in
2003.
The fluid, undulant planes of Q!’s guest rooms hint at an
almost space-age penchant for the unfamiliar, rendering standard
conventions of a guest room (say, the floor or a continuous wall)
simply outdated. Rejecting the right angles of non-Graft-designed
structures, the floors of Q! become the wall rather than simply
meet it. And where a wall might be expected, there is none; guest
bathtubs and showers are fully integrated into the main living
space. For meetings, the hotel offers a slim but savvy penthouse
suite with seating for 14.
Other Graft-designed properties on the horizon include a
similarly trendy hotel in Vancouver, as well as several hush-hush
projects Krueckeberg promises will be “very interesting and very
big.”
Yabu Pushelberg
George Yabu and Glen Pushelberg, based out of both New York City
and Toronto, founded their firm in 1980 and quickly began ruling
the industry roost. Always noted for their wild and committed
romance with texture, vibrancy and comfort, the duo remain at the
top of nearly every list of favorite firms. To truly distinguish
this team, however: Even the competition has yet to catcall.
Twice honored by the James Beard Foundation for their
restaurant work (Toronto’s Monsoon in 1998 and New York City’s Blue
Fin, N.Y., in 2001), the firm was inducted into Hotel Design’s Hall
of Fame in 2002.
Yabu Pushelberg best known for larger properties like the hip
W Hotel Times Square, the otherworldly Four Seasons in Tokyo, and
the futuristic Le Méridien Minneapolis just bestowed a new sparkler
on the boutique market with Montréal’s 136-room Hotel Godin.
Originally constructed by Joseph Arthur Godin in 1914, the
suddenly haute building was the first poured concrete structure in
North America. Yabu Pushelberg underscores this bit of history by
leaving entire slabs of concrete untouched. Don’t fret over lost
glamour, though. The finer things in wall design glass, steel,
satin and cork all have converged to ensure that every room is at
its chicest. The grand, winding staircase of yore has been
preserved and protected behind glass, a move characteristic of a
hotel that lovingly alludes to its history rather than futilely
attempts to recapture it. And in the bathroom innovation department
(every chic boutique should have one), the toilet pivots!
In 2007, YP will return to the big, full-size leagues, opening
the heftier Four Seasons Hotel Towers in Denver.
KWID
Kelly Wearstler, founder of Los Angeles-based KWID (for Kelly
Wearstler Interior Design), began her distinctly L.A.-flavored
design career working on movie sets before she achieved her current
celebrity as a residential and hotel visionary, marketing furniture
(the KWID line), appearing on television (It’s Christopher
Lowell! on the Discovery Channel) and authoring books
(Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style [Regan
Books]) with equal aplomb.
“I like to take
an established design...
and turn it on its head.”
Kelly Wearstler of KWID
So far, Wearstler’s hotel work has been restricted to
hotelier husband Brad Korzen’s KOR line of boutique West Coast
properties, such as the 43-room Maison 140, with event space for
70, or the 86-room Avalon, with a 400-square-foot conference room
and several informal cabanas, both in Beverly Hills.
As a rule, Wearstler-designed hotels breathe with an open,
dramatic elegance spaces that could be called timeless if they
weren’t so fashionable. “I like to take an established design,”
Wearstler says, “something a person expects to see in a hotel or a
home, and turn it on its head, often through a new combination of
old elements.” Vaguely retro (minus the irony), Wearstler’s rooms
are simultaneously progressive and old-fashioned.
Wearstler’s most recent project the 68-room Viceroy Palm
Springs, with its black-and-white guest rooms whose only other
color is the occasional yellow accent has proven bold to the point
of controversy. Its admirers are in the happy and stylish majority,
however, and can look forward to the 2007 opening of two new
Viceroys, in two high-style destinations: the Caribbean isle of
Anguilla, and Mayakoba, on Mexico’s Riviera Maya.