Boutique Hotel

A hotel designed to feel domestic at the scale of a city block. Natural materials, planting carried up the setbacks, and a colonnaded base that turns the pavement edge into somewhere to arrive rather than somewhere to pass.

Guest floors are set back progressively, and every setback is planted. That is what keeps a building of this bulk from reading as a slab, and it gives the upper rooms a terrace that is shaded by the floor above.

The base is a colonnade. It holds the restaurant and lobby glazing well back from the pavement, which shades the glass, widens the footway and gives the entrance a threshold rather than a door.

Inside, the palette is deliberately short — stone, timber, plaster, brass — and the lighting is warm and low. A boutique hotel is judged on how it feels at night, in the first ninety seconds.