The 39-floor, 341-room Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel officially opened on Feb. 10. The hotel, owned by Lam Generation and managed by Real Hospitality Group, marks the upper-upscale brand’s third location in the city.
The hotel’s Italian restaurant Cotto will include an indoor family-style dining room and lounge as well as a 14-seat bar when it opens in the early spring. The hotel offers 7,326 square feet of event space, including a bilevel lounge and rooftop pool and a 200-person ballroom.
Located on the former site of the Antiques Garage flea market, the hotel's design was inspired by the site’s history with a theatrical design concept by architecture and interior design firm Stonehill Taylor. Art consultant Indiewalls curated the hotel’s collection of artwork, which includes a two-story installation of antique knobs, locks and keys and video art moments throughout the hotel inspired by the local neighborhood.
"Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel encourages guests to discover this iconic location with a sense of reimagined curiosity,” George Fleck, VP of global brand marketing and management for Renaissance Hotels, said in a statement. “This new hotel, coupled with our significant growth and renovation strategy in North America, further reinforces our brand’s global commitment to ensuring that guests experience the DNA of the neighborhood through our dramatic design and engaging guest experiences—ultimately leaving with a new appreciation of the destination.”
Design Details
Stonehill Taylor's design aesthetic was created to play on the contrasting dichotomy of the hotel’s industrial, antique and floral market surroundings, creating the illusion of walking through a secret garden. The hotel’s top-floor exterior has a glass facade while the entrance evokes an English manor.
Behind a stone-walled arcade entry is a private, open-air courtyard with trees and seating for guests to lounge in fair weather.
Tapped to curate the hotel’s art collection, art consultant Indiewalls led a massive two-story installation of antique knobs, locks and keys created by local artist Laura Morrison that takes center stage as the backdrop to the lobby staircase. As guests pass through the space, they are encouraged to touch and interact with the pieces. Indiewalls also oversaw mixed-media artist Liam Alexander’s creation of various video art moments throughout the hotel, reflecting inspiration from the flower district and flea market concepts in the surrounding locale and eliciting the feeling of a “living painting.”
Photo credit: Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel
Trellage-Ferrill Studio fabricated custom pieces including a collection of upside-down bird cages and a large pendant at the elevator lobby inspired by a bird’s nest. Leather tiles made from vintage belts coat the walls of the elevator cabs.
The bi-level lounge and rooftop pool, Somewhere Nowhere, is set to open in the coming months on the hotel's 38th floor. The space will be accessible via a hidden, ground-floor passageway—a repurposed loading dock updated with spray-painted murals of fireflies and gnomes, neon signs and old-fashioned lantern sconces—that leads to an elevator. The 39th floor rooftop terrace will have one of the highest open-air pools in the city.
The hotel has 7,326-square-feet of flexible event space, including Somewhere Nowhere. The 2,170-square-foot Cardinal Ballroom can accommodate up to 200 people and has floor-to-ceiling windows that open out to Juliet balconies with city views. The ballroom can also be split into two separate rooms for smaller conferences.
A private dining room in the hotel's restaurant, Cotto, has an arched doorway, garden-style string lights, antique rugs and dried moss encased in antique gilded frames on the walls. The dining room’s greenhouse-esque glass wall folds open for access to the restaurant’s rear garden.
Guestrooms
Earth tones dominate the color palette of the 341 guestrooms and suites. Interiors are outfitted with wood-paneled printed wallcoverings and have "playful touches" like gnome desk lamps and rabbit coat hooks. Guest bathrooms are meant to look like a quaint garden shed with concrete sinks, porcelain tiles and mirrors etched with silhouettes of wildflowers.
Photo credit: Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel
Suites on the fourth and 36th floors are distinguished by their 14-foot high ceilings. A focal point of each suite is a floor-to-ceiling framed wallcovering art installation of a magnified peacock feather, as well as an oversized mural of a woman’s silhouette comprised of fuchsia roses by artist Sara Byrne.
Renaissance Hotels encompasses more than 170 hotels open around the world. The brand has two other locations open in New York City—the Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel and the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel—with another two slated to open in the next two years in Flushing and Harlem.