The hotel boom in Williamsburg – the Brooklyn neighbourhood that gave birth to the modern hipster aesthetic – continues apace.
Notably, the Wythe arrived in 2012. Then, in November 2016, the William Vale. And, now, the Williamsburg Hotel.
The blast radius of this boom has been narrow; all three are within spitting distance of one another, triangulating one of the area’s best known hangouts, the genre-bending Brooklyn Bowl. (One part bowling alley, one part restaurant, one part live music venue, it’s played host to everyone from Kanye West to Guns N’ Roses). The hotels are also just a few minutes’ walk from Bedford Avenue – a major thoroughfare filled with bars, brunch spots and vintage clothing stores which also gives its name to the subway station. Trundle down the stairs outside the local Swedish cafe and you can emerge above ground next to Google’s offices in Chelsea in less than 15 minutes. Reputedly, more than half of the tech giant’s New York staff live in Williamsburg. Vice, Amazon and several other similarly fashionable employers have major offices in the neighbourhood itself.
The Williamsburg has been much anticipated – featuring on pretty much every list of top 2017 hotel openings and generating column inches in the New York Times and beyond. It’s currently in the middle of a ‘staged’ opening – with some rooms and facilities yet to be fully completed. But there is already more than enough evidence of the Michaelis Boyd-designed interior to see that the casual-luxury nail has been hit firmly on the head. The same British studio was behind Soho House Berlin and Babington House in Somerset – two of the more recent additions to Nick Jones’ Soho House empire. (His latest property, The Ned, is scheduled to open in the City of London in May.)
Step inside the Williamsburg and you discover a high-ceilinged open bar area at its heart, whose teal suede booths serve equally well as a place to chill out during the day or to cosy up with a cocktail once the lights are dimmed. Overhanging the beautiful copper bar is an installation by street artist Eric Rieger, which includes thousands of strands of multicoloured yarn. The wallpaper was designed by the Beastie Boys’ Mike D and depicts Brooklyn legends such as the Notorious BIG and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs.
Elsewhere a palette of subtle greys and dark greens is complemented by touches of gold – on table edges as well as taps and showers in the beautiful tiled bathrooms. Chesterfield-style quilted leather in brown and burgundy makes an appearance on headboards and alongside distressed mirrors in the lifts.
Still to come are the ‘ballroom’ (a versatile event space with room for 600 seated guests, which, I’m told, will be ‘Great Gatsby meets industrial Williamsburg’), the restaurant (which will have a ‘robust freshly-milled grain and vegetable-focused’ menu), rooftop pool and ‘water tower’ bar, which – like many of the rooms’ balconies – will provide incredible views of Manhattan. The Williamsburg’s neighbour, the Wythe, has already offered proof of concept in this respect. Its buzzy sixth floor bar is the perfect place to have a late night drink, admire the bright lights of the big city and see if your accent is as popular with the locals as everyone always says it is.
“We want to show that it is possible to be cool and still understand service,” says Toby Moskovits, founder of Heritage Equity Partners, the real estate firm behind the hotel.
A Brooklyn local, whose family still owns a business that used to occupy one of the nearby buildings, buying army surplus clothing buy the pound, Moskovits is calling on the expertise of managing directors Evan Altman and James Stuart. The latter held the same role at the Standard, where he working under the man behind Chateau Marmont and the Chiltern Firehouse, André Balazs.
Unlike the William Vale, which looks as if it has been air-dropped from South Beach in Miami, the red-brick exterior of the Williamsburg is in keeping with the feel of the area. But it has been purpose-built from the ground up. “We saw a lot of the buildings coming up had started to look the same – former industrial, exposed brick inside. It was missing a fresh voice,” says Moskovitz. The interior and exterior are intended to acknowledge that “the spirit of Brooklyn lives outside Brooklyn, and to express where it’s going in the next decade.”
In the more immediate future, that spirit will be in evidence as a transatlantic hipster-luxe love affair unfolds. This year will see the opening of a Williamsburg outpost of the Hoxton Hotel (the original, unsurprisingly, is in East London’s Hoxton), The Curtain in London’s Shoreditch (a members’ club cum hotel from Michael Achenbaum, president of New York’s starry Gansevoort Hotel Group) and a Nobu hotel, also in Shoreditch.
But they’ll all have to go some if they want a decent share of the ‘yuccie’ market (that’s young, upwardly-mobile creatives). With the Williamsburg Hotel, a high bar is being set.
Find out more about the Williamsburg here.
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