Boutique Design - Fall 2020 - 72

HOTEL AS WORKPLACE
Some hospitality venues may also follow
the lead of the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn's
Williamsburg neighborhood, which teamed
up with the New York-based ofﬁce-space
provider Industrious to convert a ﬂoor of its
loft-style rooms into 14 workspaces.
The hotel stayed busy during shutdown,
because between April and late June it
donated approximately 2,000 room nights to
doctors and nurses working on the COVID-19
frontlines. "They were amazing guests, but
they also really helped us to know the pain
points for operating safely and responsibly,"
says Wythe co-owner Peter Lawrence. Faced
with minimal bookings, "we made a list of
things we thought could get people to stay
with us, and Industrious came along in July
just as we were talking about conversions of
hotel rooms into ofﬁces [like those] that were
taking place in Hong Kong and Australia."
Jamie Hodari, CEO of Industrious, says
the collaboration with the Wythe Hotel
points out two workplace trends that have
only become more crystallized during
the pandemic: a decreasing emphasis
on convening employees in a central
headquarters and an increasing frustration
with open-plan ofﬁces. "Having people work
in individual hotel rooms, set up as productive
ofﬁces, [represents] the workspace we're

trying to deliver," Hodari says. And it turns out
that local workers, tired of WFH, want what
Industrious is offering. "We have a couple of
regulars who are here multiple days a week,"
Lawrence says; "we've also had people who
come one day a week for a big Zoom call or a

mental-health workday." He adds that users
have largely come from the TV and ﬁ lmproduction industries and, perhaps more
importantly, "September [should] be the ﬁrst
month since March that we're not losing a
signiﬁcant amount of money."

A C H E C K- I N D E S K A T T H E W Y T H E H O T E L

Look just beyond the city limits to envision
how the local hospitality industry will
transition into wintertime. At Cedar Lakes
Estate in Port Jervis, New York, for example,
guests reserve stations at the hotel's barn
facility, which is now a socially distanced
coworking space. The Great Wolf Lodge
indoor water park in Pennsylvania's Pocono
Mountains has even reinvented a conference
space as a schoolhouse where kids can log
into virtual classrooms while parents work
back in their rooms (or maybe enjoy some
much-needed solitude).
Whether hospitality players rush to
coworking or embrace another approach to
generating business, change will be a constant
as New York continues operating during the
THE W Y THE HOTEL

72

FALL 2020

pandemic. The NYC Hospitality Alliance, the
membership organization that spearheaded
DineOut NYC modular outdoor initiative in
cooperation with with Rockwell Group, is one
place owners and designers will certainly be
looking for hints and inspirations. Another
platform for innovation is Design Corps.
This program from NYCxDESIGN, the New
York chapter of the American Institute of
Architects, and multiple municipal entities,
is matching designers' pro bono services
for restaurants attempting reopening.
Participants promise to share lessons learned
and best practices from their collaborations
with the wider Design Corps community,
because even in a city where there is no
shortage of ideas, we're all in this together. BD

P H OTO S : E ATA LY, R E L E V E N T O N B E H A L F O F T H E H O WA R D
H U G H E S C O R P O R AT I O N , T H E W Y T H E H OT E L

THE FUTURE IS CREATIVE
Boutique Design - Fall 2020

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