hospitalitystyle.com

(December 2008) posted on Wed Dec 17, 2008 EST

A new four-star boutique on Times Square offers guests streamlined style without the sticker shock.

By Jenny S. Reising

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Unless you've been hiding under a boulder, you've noticed that the period of exuberance is over. To stay afloat in our lean economic times, hoteliers are getting creative-and savvy-about what will attract travelers who want a stylish boutique hotel experience but don't have a style-setter's budget.

Vikram Chatwal Hotels (VCH) is known for evolving its offer to suit the market. Night was designed for the stiletto set, Dream was all about fantasy, and The Time took a colorful approach to urban design. With Stay, its fourth boutique in New York, VCH has turned out  simple, unfussy, streamlined design for A-listers who've maxed out their credit lines.

FAST-TRACK BOUTIQUE

Four months before completing an upgrade of its Quality Hotel on Times Square, VCH decided to make it a boutique property rather than a franchise. "We assessed the trends in the marketplace, the location, and our ability to make future changes to the product at our discretion, and decided the property was best suited as a boutique hotel," explains Brendan McNamara, vice president of brand development and communications at VCH.

Fortunately, the building was already being retrofitted to suit a more upscale franchise. Unfortunately, many of the design choices couldn't be changed. For example, the carpeting and wallpaper had been installed, the casegoods had been ordered, and the bathrooms had already been retrofitted.

So the challenge for the design team was to work with what it had and infuse boutique elements to elevate the design. "We didn't start reassessing the rooms until May, when we made the decision to realign the hotel as Stay," McNamara recalls. "So, we did some tweaking with coloration and fun photography to give the rooms more personality."

The fast-track design forced designers and vendors into emergency mode. McNamara turned to a stable of preferred vendors to assemble curtain samples. Forty-eight hours later, they arrived. But finding just the right splash of color (copper/cognac) in just the right fabric (raw silk) that would tie together the black casegoods and beige carpeting and wall coverings wasn't easy.

"We had fabric people searching the ends of the earth to make fabric for the 208 guest rooms, and it took about 40 days to get the fabric dyed and installed," he says. In fact, the fabric had to be custom-dyed, and Jo-Vin, a trusted vendor based in Jamaica, N.Y., delivered.