When the co-owners of The Ivy Hotel, an 18-room luxury boutique hotel which recently opened in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, traveled to Connecticut to purchase furniture from a former Relais & Chateaux property that was about to close, little did they know they would meet their new interior designer, Joszi Meskan.
“We met Joszi when we were investigating the opportunity to buy the furniture from the Inn at National Hall. She was there selling the furniture for the now-owner of that building. She had done the interior design there in the early 1990s, and actually purchased all of that furniture,” said Marty Azola, co-owner of The Ivy Hotel with Eddie Brown, chairman and CEO of Brown Capital Management, and the chief contractor on the project. “The hotel was loaded not only with new things that Joszi had found, but old antiques and old artwork, some very large pieces—some things that would be very difficult to find. We not only loved the furniture and ended up buying it, but we ended up hiring Jozsi right on the spot.”
Meskan, who runs her namesake interior design firm out of San Francisco, described the meeting in her own unique way: “The rescue of antique furniture from the Inn at National Hall was one of the luckiest breaks. The hotel had closed and the new owners were gutting it. The timing was perfect; the recession had suppressed all values and antique buyers froze in their tracks and would not buy anything. So, Mr Brown did. Some of the fabrics had not faded over the 19 years they had been there, and they have been reused. Recycling and repurposing became our passion. Hand-made everything meant more wonderful spirits imbuing the project.”
Azola told the story of the first time Meskan visited The Ivy, which is when she came up with her grand vision of the interior design. “From the moment she walked in, she saw dirty white lace curtains and what I call creepy old Victorian furniture,” he said. “She, of course, didn’t care for that and looked at all of us and said, ‘I can assure you of one thing: This new design will not be grandma’s house.’”
He continued, “Now having said that, she didn’t know at that time really what her theming would be. As it turned out, she landed on something that I think was very thoughtful and clever: Back in the day, William Painter [the inventor of the bottle cap who was the original owner of the mansion that is the base of the hotel]and other philanthropists from Baltimore traveled the world collecting exotic things from Asia and Egypt, brought them back and loaded up these buildings with layers of treasures. That concept stuck with her and she began building on that layering of stuff. We have zebra-skin rugs, end tables hand-made in Syria, Moroccan tile ceilings and all kinds of exotic furnishings and accessories that aren’t necessarily themed, but they all exude a feeling of some modern-day romantic philanthropist’s house. It’s fun and exciting, and we call it opulent but cozy.”
The hotel is comprised of four buildings—three that were built in 1885, plus a new addition which, according to Azola, had to be a product of the present, but had to be compatible with the historic buildings which it’s attached to. “Ziger/Snead, our architect, did a magnificent job in designing the exterior addition,” he said.
Inside, Azola and his team had to reconfigure the space to allow breathing room within the suites. The original building had undergone a restoration in the mid-1980s, commissioned by then-Mayor William Donald Schaeffer, and was turned into the Inn at Government House, where he hosted visiting dignitaries to Baltimore. The rooms were of modest proportion, according to Azola, so walls were knocked down and bathrooms were consolidated.
“The rooms were modestly sized and amenities like bathrooms were very small and residential in scale, kind of like what you would have as a second bathroom at your home,” he said. “When this project became quite upscale, the bathrooms of that size wouldn’t do. There was a reshuffling of spaces. What started out as 24 rooms under the Inn at Goverment House design became 18 rooms—nine suites and nine individual rooms—and the missing room count was gobbled up for amenities for those that survived. One bathroom in suite 7 was actually an entire suite of its own [when the building was the inn].”
It was then up to Meskan to go to work, which involved teaming with local artists and art students to paint murals and furniture to make each room distinct. “Many of the guestrooms are very intimate, and each is one different from the next in layout. Only two things had to fit—the bed and the piece of furniture housing the refrigerator and coffee service,” said the designer. “So, how to create art and glamour was tricky. Two years ago, I met a teacher from one of the many art schools in Baltimore. I wondered if she could give jobs to some of her students painting the piece of furniture with the refrigerator and coffee service. She organized this effort and brilliantly had produced 10 pieces of art, each unique and each with a sense of humor. Then, the bed had to produce the glamour. Each has a canopy or ceiling rosette, and each is hung with sumptuous silks surrounding the posts and puddling on the floor. I don’t suggest trying this at home but, as a romantic and elegant stage set for a very important person—a guest—it shouts out rich and beautiful.
“There are all the other necessities [in the rooms]— desk, chair, nightstand, TV—but, unusual for most hotels, there is a fireplace in every room. The bathrooms are modern, all white limestone with glass tile showers and heated floors, and they are very, very bright. They will be classic 50 years from now.”