Roman and Williams
Post By:Kitticoon Poopong
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
Building and History
Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were neighbors; ‘Diamond Jim’ Brady (the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s Guys & Dolls character) was a regular; visionary painter Harry Smith lived there. It was the Hotel Breslin then, and it is now the new Ace Hotel NYC.Built in 1904 as part of what would become an avenue of hotels – electric signs spelling out Victoria, Hoffman, and Breslin gave this stretch of Broadway between 23rd and 29th Streets the famous moniker “the Great White Way” – the 344-room, 165,000-square-foot Hotel Breslin was one of the city’s best-known residential hotels in the early part of the 20th century, in a neighborhood known for its color.
This was the Times Square of the turn of the century, an area full of clubs and restaurants and New York’s first neighborhood to be electrified with lighting and signage. Tin Pan Alley, legendary home to even more legendary songwriters and music publishers like George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin was at the northern edge, and the surrounding blocks became home to factories and shops that made and sold everything from hats to chocolates to clothes by 1930.
Like the building’s history, the Ace Hotel is improvisational, a mix of materials and styles and historical periods and objects that comes together in layers. The hotel’s design takes its cues from the vibrancy of street life, the honesty of materials and the potential of invention. It is about soul, latent in the old architecture and re-introduced through the new design.
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
Lobby
There is more than enough history and color to go around, and plenty of detail as well. The twelve-story hotel, built from brick and topped with a mansard roof, centers around a fantastically detailed lobby. Original coffered ceilings, plaster moldings, strong moldings, massive columns, airy skylights, and mosaic floors inlaid with a Greek key pattern, some of it obscured by layers of unsympathetic renovations, provide the bass notes.Roman & Williams spotlights the former and fixes the latter, removing the falseness of an updated history and re-creating the aesthetic and historical stability that comes from the building’s great bones. The architecture itself is so strong, the original ethos so perfectly articulated, that the design decisions introduced by Roman & Williams are like the riffs on a chord progression. The firm is unconstrained by any attention to a particular time period or style; instead, the inspiration comes from a desire to create a space of intimacy and warmth.
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
The “library” is defined by custom blackened steel shelving units (with a selection of books curated by Ace and Roman and Williams), a French bakery table, school chairs and English wing chairs. For the reception desk, Roman & Williams fused together three steel factory tables, covered the tops in leather, and retrofit them to hold all the computer equipment necessary for a contemporary hotel. A large vintage apothecary cabinet behind the desk provides storage.
For the lobby bar, Roman & Williams took an entire room, reclaimed from the library of a Park Avenue apartment, and installed it like a stage set in the lobby. This 25-by-10-foot space operates as a found object, as a celebrated artwork, and as a focal point. It isn’t a trick – the bracing that holds it up and the room’s section-like cut visible – but it represent the designers’ embrace of history, without the need to slavishly recreate it. Above the bar, huge 7-foot-high marquis letters spelling out ACE fill the space between the top of the found room and the 18-foot ceilings. Ace and Roman & Williams are commissioning an artist to paint a mural on top of and around these letters.
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
Rooms
Where the lobby is layered and historical, playful and referential, the rooms are a little more efficient, but still like a funky small apartment. Custom-designed furnishings, such as a custom leather sofa that turns into a bed, and beds and desks of plywood and black and paint feel like mid-century wood prototypes, pieces created right at the cusp of something new, parts of the invention of a whole new style; an exposed rack made out of bent plumbing pipes and with hanging steel boxes replaces a closet and plays the part of historical reminder, a reference to the neighborhood’s industrial history. |
| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
Chalkboard paint on the walls and paintings by young artists individualize each room.
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| Photo © Courtesy of Roman and Williams / The Ace Hotel |
The people
Interior Designer: Roman and WilliamsLocation: New York, United States
Photographs: Shantanu Starick
Visit The Ace Hotel, New York web site: http://www.acehotel.com/newyork
