Hotels magazine Q&A with New York Architect Gene Kaufman

By Monica Rogers, contributing editor -- Hotels, 3/1/2008 3:34:00 PM

New York City architect Gene Kaufman is setting records as the man with the most Manhattan hotel design projects in the works—36 right now, mostly mid-market brands such as Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn and Doubletree. Five are planned for the same block and six represent the new "skinny" in urban hotel design: three-in-one hotels. HOTELS magazine chatted with Kaufman from his SoHo office to hear his ideas on compelling design for the mid-priced Manhattan market.

HOTELS: Which emerging trends are you seeing in New York City hotel design—what do you like? What don’t you like?

Kaufman: Branded hotels are becoming more unique, with a higher attention to materials and qualities that were the hallmark of boutique hotels, which is a good thing. Meanwhile, as the price of a standard hotel room goes up, there is pressure to create hotels with lower priced rooms, which ultimately means smaller rooms and maybe lower budget finishes. The simultaneous existence of both conditions means a potential diversification in the range of hotel development.

HOTELS: What design benefits will a brand enjoy if it does several small hotels in different neighborhoods around Manhattan rather than doing just one, big hotel?

Kaufman: Utilizing small sites or subdividing larger sites allows us to scale buildings down to match the scale of the neighborhood, and the more personal scale of the individual guest, but widens opportunities. There are many more small or irregular sites than big and regular ones, especially when a high floor area ratio allows for a tall building.

HOTELS: How do you keep the hotels within the best possible context of the neighborhood they are in?

Kaufman: In the downtown financial district we have a site with some existing small historic rowhouses we are preserving. We are building two separate towers that have the vertical proportions of the classic skyscrapers to give this area its signature identity, rather than a large horizontal slab building. It makes a better business model and a better urban context.

HOTELS: When tucking three buildings side-by-side in the skinny, three-in-one-building hotel model you have developed, how do you effectively communicate brand identity? How much design overlap should occur?

Kaufman: We are able to brand the buildings with signage and flags at the street. In Manhattan, you rarely see even a large building from a distance, so the visual identity cues are scaled to the arrival experience. This is the classic scale of New York City—the storefront, where we can make a personalized expression for each building, as well as independent identities for the restaurant or bar within the hotel. We have 200 years of local urban history showing that it works. Typically when we plan adjacent hotels, not only is the guest experience completely autonomous, the independent identity of each hotel is clearly expressed on the exterior. Service functions, however, might be connected for maximum efficiency. It is a best of both worlds scenario.

HOTELS: Five Hampton Inns in Manhattan—that is a design challenge. What is unique to each? What is repeated?

Kaufman: All five of our Hampton Inns looks completely different on the outside—size, architectural expression, etc.—but the guestrooms are remarkably similar. So the guest experience provides all of the constants and standards that a guest expects of a Hampton, but there is enough variety that there is a freshness to the experience in staying in the different locations.

HOTELS: You are known for your ability to fit a lot of rooms on a given site, any comments on this?

Kaufman: Room count is the key to the financial success of the project, so from the owner's point of view we should, and do, fit in as many rooms as possible. That is how we make our clients rich and successful. But this must be invisible to the guest. So our guest floors are built around their intimacy. With small lots and high-rise construction, our typical floor plate has about eight guestrooms, so you never have to walk down a long corridor past rows of identical doors to get to your room. Even though our guestroom might be smaller, you don't get the feeling there are a lot of rooms being fit in the way you do on a large floor.

HOTELS: How do you deal with chain control? Where do you begin and they end? How do you deliver on the brand promise and still maintain freshness and some independence of design thought?

Kaufman: Brand standards must be met, but that does not necessarily mean copying a prototype. If the rooms and public areas function the way they are supposed to, brands will consider alternatives to many prototypical elements. They understand that we have parameters and a vision of what we want and need to achieve, and we understand that there are certain critical points for them. There is a back-and-forth process. We don't necessarily get our way. But we always get something that works for everyone.

HOTELS: How do you create compelling design when you are dealing with hundreds of identical rooms?

Kaufman: If you leaf through a set of floor plans, you see the repetitive nature of the basic hotel paradigm. But the guest typically goes from the lobby to their room, and they never see all those other possibly identical floors. The front façade is often the only place where they can see the number of rooms repeated—actually typically half the rooms. And the front façade is where we make a strong artistic intervention to counterbalance that repetitive internal organization, using differing materials, colors, window sizes, and so on, to make an architectural composition where rooms are not necessarily individual elements but where say, two floor may read as one, or a group of forms may form a single larger architectural element, so the building has a singular identity that supersedes that repetition. At the Wyndham in the Financial District for example, we weave a light gray glazed ceramic in two-story high bands and figural elements within the framework of a black brick building. At the Four Points by Sheraton in Soho, we express a pair of “houses” at the top of the building, each comprising 10 rooms and suites in a single façade element.

HOTELS: Which hotel project of yours stayed closest to the way you first envisioned it?

Kaufman: Nothing stays completely the way you envision it. Close, is as good as it gets. Several hundred people have their hands and/or their minds on each project. Some problems get solved a second or even a third time, and we often have to think on our feet. The key is to keep the vision the same—even if the details change. We did a small boutique hotel—the Duane Street Hotel, in Tribeca, opened this year, that stayed very close to the initial vision, despite a very extended schedule and no brand requirements—so it is possible.

HOTELS: Have you had projects that evolved away from your initial design to become something quite different, but, in the end better?

Kaufman: We have changed brands on projects mid-stream, designed projects with flexibility and branded them later in the process, changed the building size, even the client. Sometimes the schedule or commitments do not permit the normal process to occur in the normal way. But we have been able to navigate unorthodox procedures successfully. Perhaps it comes from understanding the fundamentals that underlie the process and maintaining them, even when the surface seems to be changing radically.

HOTELS: Please talk a bit about materials you are experimenting with—organic and inorganic?

Kaufman: People respond to new and different materials, especially when they expand the palette of what is commonly encountered. We have a Marriott Fairfield Inn going up by Times Square with a glazed fire engine red brick that did not exist when we had the idea. We had samples custom fired repeatedly in Texas until we had something that corresponded to our vision. Some new brands we are working on really rethink the use of materials, such as aloft by Starwood. We recently started construction for New York City’s first Aloft, in downtown Brooklyn. The lobby design has concrete floors and ceilings, with floating wood ceiling panels and a glass zero-clearance fireplace. We have been using more gritty urban materials, such as a black brick on the exterior. Somehow, the proverbial beige or pink-and-green do not have that New York City feel.

HOTELS: Please talk a bit about shapes and spatial qualities within guestrooms and public spaces. What has been influencing you most? How have your thoughts evolved on this?

Kaufman: The spatial qualities of many branded hotels are not as complex as the signature boutique hotels, but they are not offered at the same price point either. The concept of the lobby as a great living room, with more personality and amenities than the traditional hotel lobby, is becoming the norm with aloft, Hyatt Place, Staybridge Suites and others incorporating this in their basic concept. We have been designing all-glass one story lobby extensions into the rear yard to create a garden feel and bring in natural light, which is a welcome surprise to a visitor to the city. We’ve done this at Sheraton Four Points, Holiday Inn, Doubletree, Hampton Inn.

HOTELS: Any comments about lighting design? Sustainability?

Kaufman: Lighting is critical in establishing the feel. Some people hardly ever see natural light during their stay because of the hours they keep or because the curtains are always closed. Sustainable materials and green design are really making a strong presence. We are designing two green hotels. It influences everything from mechanical systems to materials. We designed a green wall, with plants that would grow over the 30 story south facing front façade in a soil-less irrigated grid system, but without a precedent on this scale, the concept did not survive a process of second-guessing.

HOTELS: You know New York very well. Do you infuse properties in various neighborhoods with style/feeling you have for a particular area, or rather with historical context?

Kaufman: Responding to a neighborhood is a way of giving a project an identity. Unlike some less complex places there is no single New York City style, image or context. But there is no one way of looking at a single neighborhood either, which is good, because in Chelsea, for instance, we have nine hotel projects.

HOTELS: How do you strike a balance in designing spaces that will meet guests need to retreat and relax in the hotel, and their search for a sense of excitement?

Kaufman: You can not script the guest experience—you can only provide an environment in which it takes place. Even the hottest restaurant has that moment before the first person arrives.