Hospitality Design - April 2011 - 159

interview: brendan mcnamara

perspectives

are in bed, our telephones will allow you to see who is at the door to your room. Basically like a Visafone, you can see who is standing at the door from a screen at your bed. Everything is remote from the bedside—you can turn on and off the lights, the television, you can put on the do not disturb sign. There is nothing more annoying to me than forgetting to turn on the do not disturb. HD: You are tweaking the Night brand as well? BM: Like Dream, we are going through all the explorations of what the brand will be in the future. With Dream, we know we can’t put a speciﬁc guestroom template into a book and say this is what they all have to look like, because that’s not what people expect in lifestyle hotels in that market. They are looking for different experiences in each hotel. Whereas for Night, a more mid-scale and limited-service model, we do have to make the guestroom design scalable to an extent, where we might have core elements that are the same. Night is a pretty aggressive design as it currently stands on 45th Street. To make it adaptable to a multi-market scenario, it would have to be a little more mainstream than it currently is. It will have the same core essence of being cutting edge without being so hip it hurts. Certain markets can absorb a little more than others. It’s fun to be in this evolutionary process. We are right in the middle of the exploration of a lot of these items. You can do all sorts of fun things that don’t have to cost a lot of money or be translated to cost a lot of money to the guest. In an urban area, having charging stations for electric vehicles doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money. There will be DJs in every Dream lobby/reception or in bars surrounding it. At Night, we discussed the concept of making the guest the DJ for the public spaces, meaning some sort of new interpretation of a jukebox, where everybody gets to control what they are hearing. Just because you are staying at someplace where you would expect to see a Marriott Courtyard or some other limitedservice or extended-stay hotel, doesn’t mean you can’t have all the fun attributes of a lifestyle hotel. HD: Can you give any hints to the look and feel of Dream South Beach? BM: That’s an interesting case. We did the interior design with Michael Czysz from the group Architropolis. In South Beach, if I saw another white-on-white room I would gag. Michael took a very different slant on the whole scenario—they are very icy-cool blue. He reinterpreted that blue lighting essence we used in the original Dream properties, and took it to basically make the whole room in that tone. The guestrooms are late ’70s Halston meets a little bit of French Moroccan in the most clever of ways. We also like this treatment of Chromax that we have used in both South Beach and Downtown. It is like a metallic car paint. You can use it on MDF or wood, but it basically gives the appearance of metal, but it’s warm to the touch. The bed frame and headboard in South Beach have this interesting Moroccan-inspired pattern, but the actual material is MDF and it’s spray coated with a gold metallic Chromax. In the Downtown guestrooms, the headboard is a different interpretation of MDF with a routed pattern in it, and that’s Chromax painted in

silver. It’s kind of hard to put Michael’s design ethos into words. He had certain shapes he likes to use. They don’t even have a geometric name really, but you notice them when you see them. They are almost like modiﬁed lozenge shapes in the architecture itself. Any bits of architecture he has added to these Deco buildings, he has put those odd geometric shapes. HD: Any cool F&B offerings? BM: It will be the ﬁrst location of our pool bar, which will be branded the same in the Dream properties—it will be one of the only things that you will see that’s the same everywhere, called the Deep End. It has a fantastic view of the ocean since the hotel is sitting right behind the old Versace mansion. HD: Why South Beach? BM: To build a footprint for a lifestyle brand in the U.S., certain locations have to be on your radar. South Beach is one of them. LA is just a matter of ﬁnding the right product, right place, and right time. The West Hollywood, Beverly Hills corridor can feel oversaturated, but if I had to guess where we would end up next, it would be in that area. HD: Will ﬁsh tanks still be part of the Dream design? BM: It’s bit of a maintenance nightmare. [In Dream in Midtown Manhattan] the tank holds 5,000 gallons of salt water and requires the same amount of ﬁltration you would see in backyard swimming pool. The cost of maintaining it is not prohibitive, but close. I am making jokes about the Downtown property in that we have a ﬁsh tank, it’s just our pool. The pool is right above the lobby, and it has a glass bottom so you can see through to the pool from the bar below. It’s the human ﬁsh tank. I was originally making jokes that I wanted there to be a drip so it look like it was leaking. The architects didn’t think it was so funny though. That is sort of the response I get from half of the things I say. For the light alarm, they asked, ‘are you on crack?’ I said, ‘No, I know we can do this,’ and they ﬁgured it out. HD: But the idea is to have something people have never seen, right? BM: I remember when I was a kid and I would go to a hotel and would see things you didn’t have at home. That was part of the experience, particularly in the luxury segment. And it seems like somewhere over the last 10, 15 years that hasn’t been the case any more; technology moved so quickly, and people have become so design savvy with the rise of HDTV and the DIY network and everything else. I think part of what we are trying to do with the new products for Dream is give people things they don’t encounter at home anymore. Which comes back to the whole idea of escapism. Things like the light alarm waking you up. It’s not typical for your home, and you don’t typically have blue lighting underneath your bed. Does it make it any less comfortable? No. There is a discovery involved in the hotel. Everybody likes to experience everything a little different. While it may not be how you decorate your home, it’s a nice departure.

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