NEW YORK—There was a time when architecture and interior design firms didn’t have a lot of hotel work to do in New York City—but those days are long gone.
“Back in 2004-07, there was a strong residential market and an OK hotel market, so they were converting hotel rooms to residences left and right,” noted Neill Parker, principal, Stonehill & Taylor, pointing to properties like The Plaza, The Stanhope and The Mayflower. And then, of course, no one completed anything but the most basic of renovations during the Great Recession. That changed, said Parker, with conversions breaking first, followed by new-builds.
Vince Stroop, principal, Stonehill & Taylor, added, “I would say almost 50-60% are new-builds now whereas, before, it was probably a split of 80/20.” Parker added that the firm has some 10 new-builds currently underway in the NYC metro area.
Both principals conceded that there are challenges to designing in New York, but those challenges also lead to creative opportunities. For instance, while brands really want to be in New York, prototypes don’t work here. Stroop said, “That’s a challenge because you’re trying to fit a program set for the cloverleaf of Indianapolis or areas like the Sun Belt cities, where they have a lot more available land, onto a smaller footprint. But, it’s also an opportunity because it’s harder to wow guests here with what’s perceived to be smaller, so you have to be a lot more creative.”
Stroop added that the New York guest tends to be a sophisticated traveler, so the standards are much higher. Parker noted this goes for developers as well. “The barriers to entry are so much higher for a developer because of the land costs, the development costs, construction costs, the difficulty of building in constrained sites—all of that basically weeds out the developers that are risk-averse and inexperienced,” he said. “That’s important: the quality of client and his openness to new thinking.”
For instance, he pointed to one of the firm’s two Moxy projects in the city. Both the Moxy on 28th St. and the Moxy on 36th St. and 7th Ave. are expected to be completed in 2017. “We’re doing a project on 28th St., which is a Moxy hotel, and we’re actually making the outside of the new building out of raw concrete and self-rusting steel,” he said. “I don’t know that I can sell a concept like that to a tertiary city or rural location but, in this case, it’s all about the neighborhood, and there’s a real appetite for that kind of thing.”
Parker added that more creative design also can happen just outside areas like Manhattan. “We’re doing the interior design of something in Jersey City, which is exploiting the Palisades right there,” he said. “The building is one story on one side and 12 stories on the other. These creative developers are coming in to sites like that in close proximity to the city but with constraints on them, and they have the stomach for undertaking challenging projects. That wasn’t possible 10 years ago in locations like that, but it is now.”
Another challenge architects face comes from the city itself. “We have three new buildings that are living in districts that have mandatory contextual zoning, meaning the city wants to see the street remain as is,” explained Parker. “Therefore, it has a requirement that the building be built out to the street, rather than be pushed back with a plaza in front of it, but you can only go up six or seven stories, depending on the district.” However, he said, developers obviously prefer to maximize the number of keys. “You have a requirement for this street wall, and a requirement for the setback, and how you do that becomes a challenge.
“At the Dream Hotel, we’re using the zoning parameter to create an art screen wall that becomes part of this public art program, and uses part of the building to act as art,” said Stroop. Parker elaborated: “We have that mandatory street wall, but we really don’t have a lot of program to put up against it because we don’t want absurdly deep hotel rooms. We created a screen wall to go around and satisfy the street wall requirement, and the screen wall will be made out of punched aluminum. An artist we’re commissioning will do the design of all of the punches. The hotel is expected to open in 2018.
“Another project that has that same constraint on it is the Crowne Plaza at 36th St., which will be Crowne Plaza at Times Square South,” he said. “We, more or less, designed a standard hotel building set back in the way the developer would want to do it, done in a flat-plate concrete construction, which is the most efficient. In front of that is an 80-ft.-high atrium with a restaurant that’s part of the hotel at the base. That will be built out of steel construction.” Surrounding destinations like the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Penn Station and the Lincoln Tunnel inspired Stonehill & Taylor. “The hotel is in what we call the transportation district, so we’re emphasizing the galvanized-steel truss work, and things that allude to bridges, roads and industrial activities that dominated the West Side,” said Parker, noting that the hotel would be finished Q4 2016. He added that a future project that’s part of the Willets Point Development will approach this zoning challenge in another way.
Both principals noted that several NYC neighborhoods—like NoMad and the Garment District—have gone through tremendous change in recent years. Parker added that Hudson Yards is seeing that now. “The immense investment coming in there has had a ripple effect in the city,” he said, noting that Stonehill & Taylor is the architect for the Equinox Hotel, scheduled to complete in 2018, which will be located in a 1,000-ft.-high, mixed-use development designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. “That is spurring other things, among them, the Crowne Plaza and also one of the Moxy projects,” said Parker. “People are talking to us about other projects in that same neighborhood. It’s definitely transforming.”
And Brooklyn continues to be a hotspot. “We’re doing several projects in Brooklyn,” Parker said, pointing specifically to a Hampton Inn project that opened last summer at the corner of Tillary St. and Flatbush Ave. “It’s an excellent site and, during the course of construction, the site next door became available. We redesigned the lower levels of what we had been building to permit the construction of a tower twice as tall on the neighboring property that would use the public space of the first,” he said. “The first phase opened and the second phase is under construction.” The second phase is scheduled to finish Q3 2016. “That’ll transform that area along the Flatbush Ave. corridor,” he said. “There’s been a number of large developments there, most of them residential, but this will be at the crux of the key corner and will include a hospitality suite at the top of the building with views into Manhattan.”
Parker and Stroop identified several trends in New York: the pod concept, which developers love because they can focus budgets on the lobby, which makes up 5% of the hotel space, and double the number of keys; the rise of boutiques—Parker noted that about 50% of the firm’s portfolio in New York is unbranded, which doesn’t line up with nationwide averages; a hotel and residential mix, in which the first 20 floors of a building are a hotel and the top 20 floors are residential, allowing the owner to maximize the money it can command for residential, since better views mean higher-priced listings; and historic hotels.
As for the last trend, Parker noted that this is always an ongoing trend in places like New York, noting that Stonehill & Taylor is currently working on the InterContinental Barclay, which “involves adding additional space into this historic building in a difficult and creative way.” Stroop elaborated, “We added two new ballrooms. We’re organizing the mechanical yard better on one side of the building to free up the other side to create a large sky suite with a great view to the Chrysler Building. We renovated all 702 rooms, and it should open in March.”