Hospitality Design - April 2011 - 156

perspectives

interview: brendan mcnamara

nude. There is another one of a bird taking ﬂight, which obviously references ﬂight and dreaming. We take that thread throughout all the properties, and it is evolving as we go along. Food and beverage is a large part of what makes the hotels what they are, and we are putting more and more emphasis as we go along. The Downtown property in New York will have six F&B venues, which will become a social hive. One signature restaurant out of the two has a really interesting chef, Dr. Miguel Sanchez Romera. He is a neurologist by day, and a Michelin rated chef by night. He’s originally from Barcelona, and he is opening his ﬁrst stateside restaurant with us. He is the ﬁrst in a new generation of cooking thought, which is kind of the next thing after molecular cuisine, and for lack of a better description it is called neuro-gastronomy. He is such an interesting character. It will be 65 seats with a fairly high price point because it does a stage seating, almost like theater. Everyone shows up at the same time because he does a very orchestrated menu that is 12 courses, all preset. The other F&B offerings will be much more in line with what people expect to see in a lifestyle hotel. There is a 5,000-square-foot rooftop bar that has fantastic views of Midtown, and a gorgeous design. It is sort of this late ’70s luxe: deep dark chocolate tones, yellow brass, and smoky charcoal glass, a very late ’70s sort of Halston-esque vibe. There is a pool bar because there is a pool between the two buildings that make up the property. And then there is a hidden bar somewhere in the building that will be announced three months after our opening. HD: How did that idea come about? BM: It is something I have always wanted to do. Truth be told we found a little bit of extra space in the back of the house of the hotel, and I took that opportunity to say let’s do another bar, because you can’t have enough places to go out and have a good time. I have always wanted to do this concept of a bar that you have to discover or know where it is to get in. HD: Does the whole hotel have that ’70s feel? BM: In a way, because the guestroom design, the origins came out of an old photograph we found of Andy Warhol’s factory. When I was working with the hotel’s architects, Handel Architects, we had been playing with this icy metallic look, and one of the design team members brought in a picture of the factory, and it was one of those images where all the walls were covered with aluminum foil. Like a lot of things that is how the design inspiration started. We do have a very metallic slant to the guestrooms there, so there is a ’70s reference there.

Left: A rendering of the textural desk area in a Dream South Beach guestroom.

HD: Why this location? BM: We had been looking at the site for quite awhile. If you look at Manhattan over the years, certain areas become developed and it almost shifts the emphasis of what happens in the city. I almost think of it as if you are looking at the city at plane view, it would tilt a different direction sometimes. I feel that has happened in a way with the downtown marketplace, both LES and the Meatpacking District. If you looked at the Meatpacking District 10 years ago, it doesn’t look like it does right now. We have been looking at that area for almost as long as I have been working at this company, which is about 12 years. But it just so happened that it ended up being the right site. It was originally part of the same complex the Maritime [hotel] sprung from. That was originally the Maritime Union Complex built in 1968, designed by the architect Albert Ledner. Sean [MacPherson] and Eric [Goode] got involved and bought that parcel around 2001 or 2002; a couple years later we bought that back two-thirds of the parcel. HD: Who is handling the interior design? BM: Actually they have an interiors team at Handel, and we chose to go with them speciﬁcally for this project because I ﬁnd it a lot easier to move through the process if it is all being done in one shop. It became an organic process where as an owner we felt we had a true input into what is going to happen from an interiors standpoint. Half the reason you hire an interior designer is for their fantastic visual eye, but at the same time, you tend to lose a little bit of control over things from a pragmatic side of things. We knew we wanted to do some interesting things as far as technology was concerned in the guestrooms, we knew there were a lot of public spaces to deal with, and ultimately we wanted to manipulate as much as we could ourselves, and we have a great internal creative team as well. HD: What sort of technology? BM: We decided to go as forward thinking as we could. From the front end [we used] INNCOM that turns a guestroom into a smart room. It knows someone has entered the room. It knows when somebody has left the room, so it will set back the lighting and air conditioning to conserve energy. It also knows when someone is sleeping but hasn’t left the room. We are doing some clever stuff with it too. I think we are the ﬁrst hotel where you can set a wakeup call that will wake you up with light instead of audibly. If you

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