Moxy

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares129 Views

    Basile Studio enlivens Moxy Williamsburg hotel with “eclectic grab-bag” of spaces

    by

    Hotel brand Moxy has opened its first outpost in Brooklyn, with plentiful gathering spaces including a bar with motorised 20-feet-tall liquor shelves and an eatery modelled on Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture.

    Californian hospitality design practice Basile Studio spearheaded the interior design of the 216-room hotel, set in the heart of Williamsburg on bustling Bedford Avenue.
    The aim was for the design to reflect the area’s rich history and its eclectic inhabitants while creating a slew of public spaces for locals and visitors to enjoy.
    Moxy Williamsburg’s public spaces include the lobby (above) and Jolene lounge (top)”The design for Moxy Williamsburg was inspired by the neighbourhood’s history as a magnet for mavericks, immigrants and creators while taking its place at the centre of Brooklyn’s contemporary social scene,” Basile Studio’s lead designer Ashley Evans told Dezeen.
    “The hotel’s eclectic public spaces reflect the area’s melting pot character, finding inspiration in both past and present with influences from both near and far.”

    Among the hotel’s communal spaces are several co-working studios with modular rearrangeable furnishings as well as four different dining and nightlife venues created in collaboration with Bar Lab – the hospitality company behind Miami’s famous Broken Shaker cocktail bar.
    Bar Bedford lies just off the lobby”For Moxy Williamsburg, we envisioned an eclectic grab-bag of experiences that mirrors Williamsburg’s diversity,” said Bar Lab founders Elad Zvi and Gabe Orta. “Once you enter, you don’t want to leave.”
    It is housed in an 11-storey building, designed by local studio Stonehill Taylor, which has a glass-fronted facade that opens completely onto the sidewalk of Bedford Avenue.
    Guests enter via a lobby with exposed 20-foot ceilings, reminiscent of Brooklyn’s many converted warehouses.
    The room is organised around a curved barOn one side, custom timber joinery frames a small seating area with a built-in bench and a long planter, helping to soften the otherwise industrial space.
    A monumental artwork by creative studio RareCulture presides over the hotel’s two blacked-steel check-in counters. Stretching up all the way across the ceiling, this shows a pointillist depiction of nearby Williamsburg Bridge formed from thousands of colourful crayons.
    Immediately to the right lies Bar Bedford, which was designed to resemble a comfortable living space.
    Oblong windows connect the bar to the neighbouring Mesiba restaurant”Our seating is miscellaneous and meant to feel warm and inviting, modular in the sense that we want to invite people to move around and get social,” Evans said.
    The room’s centrepiece is a curved bar, which houses 1,500 bottles of wine and liquor inside a custom 20-foot-tall cabinet made from white oak and glass, with motorised shelves that move up and down like dumbwaiters.
    Although designed largely for entertainment value, the system was actually modelled on New York’s historic automat restaurants.
    The restaurant features plentiful planting and leather-upholstered booths”The automats, ubiquitous in New York in the first half of the 20th century, were fast food restaurants where customers would pick up their food from a wall of glass-fronted cubbies,” said Mitchell Hochberg, president of the hotel’s developer Lightstone.
    “We thought it would be fun to take something that was iconically New York and introduce it into the design.”
    Timber also features here in the form of the dramatic pendant lights – designed by Basil to resemble a giant nest of twigs – and the portals that provide a peek into the neighbouring Levantine restaurant Mesiba.

    Yabu Pushelberg references multi-faceted LA culture in conjoined hotels

    With its textured plasterwork, abundant greenery and curved seating booths upholstered in burgundy-red leather, the eatery was designed to reference the buildings of Tel Aviv.
    “The curvilinear lines of Bauhaus architecture find echoes in the rounded bar overhang and the oblong wood-framed etched-glass windows that offer a glimpse into Bar Bedford,” Evans said.
    “Travertine tabletops hearken back to Tel Aviv’s historic architecture, providing a striking contrast to the Bauhaus-influenced elements.”
    The hotel’s club has marquee-style lights integrated into its ceilingMoxy Williamsburg has three co-working and meeting rooms that can be used independently or combined to host larger groups thanks to their modular furnishings.
    After hours, the hotel also has its own club, named Jolene in homage to the iconic Dolly Parton song and outfitted with a sound system designed by DJ Nicolas Mater – the owner of infamous New York nightclubs Output and Cielo.
    Informed by 70s interiors and mid-century recording studios, the space is lined with rows of integrated high-fidelity speakers and rectangular acoustical panels in shades of green and gray.
    The hotel also has a rooftop bar and terraceWalnut, leather and fabric finishes ensure warm, resonant acoustics while hundreds of multicoloured, marquee-style lights that sync to the music are integrated into the ceiling.
    Modular furniture, including floating banquettes and low semicircular armchairs, allows the space to act as a lounge, a club or something in between.
    On the top floor, Basile Studio imbued the LiliStar rooftop bar with Balinese influences that can be seen in the hand-shaped timber chairs and the theatrical ceiling lights, which resemble giant lotus flowers carved from copper, glass and leather.
    Custom birch wood joinery defines the guest rooms”It’s much more playful here with an elevated tropical feel while, again, not being too literal,” Evans said. “We stuck to patterns and textures along with shelving inspired by shutters and exteriors of homes in Bali.”
    The hotel’s 216 bedrooms are pared back and fitted with space-saving birchwood joinery such as collapsible desks and wall-mounted pegs, that guests can be folded away when they are no longer needed.
    Moxy has recently completed a number of other outposts across the US. Among them is New York’s Lower East Side branch designed by Michaelis Boyd and another in Downtown Los Angeles by Yabu Pushelberg.

    Read more: More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Rooms

      Yabu Pushelberg references multi-faceted LA culture in conjoined hotels

      by

      Canadian design studio Yabu Pushelberg has created the Moxy and AC Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles to encapsulate a variety of references to the surrounding city.

      The two hotels were placed side by side within a Gensler-designed building in central Los Angeles, with Yabu Pushelberg carrying out the design for both hotels.
      The designers used a variety of LA-oriented references across both hotels, referencing local artist culture, streetlife, the desert, as well as the imagery of movies from Hollywood.
      The Moxy Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles was designed based on deserts and cinema”Moving making and the California Dream are all mashed up together to create this atmosphere,” studio co-founder George Yabu told Dezeen.
      “We also captured the grittiness,” added co-founder Glenn Pushelberg. 

      The hotels were designed to complement each other, providing various experiences for guests, who the team hopes can be staying in one while visiting the bars and restaurants of the others.
      Yabu Pushelberg wanted to challenge guests with a sense of “grittiness”According to the duo, the hotels are meant to be the day and nighttime versions of the same person or “like the same person in different movies”.
      AC Hotel provides a more work-oriented vision and the Moxy representing a more dimly lit atmosphere.
      The Moxy includes lounge areas with plush furnitureUsing desert themes and references to the 1969 film Easy Rider starring Peter Fonda, the Moxy has rammed earth walls, woven wall hangings and homages to motorcycle culture with a custom pouf designed with Harley Davidson in mind. It even has a motorcycle in the lobby lounge.
      “If you look at the materialities and colors and textures, it is kind of off-off, which makes it on,” said Pushelberg. 
      AC Hotel is more restrainedAlso in the Moxy’s lobby is a snakeskin-like carpet with a graphic of a snake.
      The hotel includes studio spaces above the lobby with neon lights and plush furniture; minimal rooms with tile and stone walls; and a bar inspired by the “roadside gas station” with mottled stone countertops, metal mesh liquor cabinets and “cocoon-like” chairs.
      The AC Hotel is meant to evoke the artist’s loftThe AC Hotel is more restrained. The lobby is on the 34th floor and was designed to evoke the “artist’s loft” with views of the city below. Materials were inspired by Spanish architecture – such as textured plaster and stucco.
      These details continue throughout the bars, guestrooms and library lounge, with the addition of wooden sculptures and dark black tile.
      Yabu Pushelberg designed the carpets in the guest rooms to “reflect the geometric pattern and color story found throughout the hotel” and contrast the birch wood flooring.

      Ibiza’s first hotel gets bohemian refresh from Dorothée Meilichzon

      According to the team, the hotels together are meant to bring together a variety of local influences to attract people to the downtown core.
      “It’s a ​​perfect time for the hotels to be there because all these different types of people have never ever had a reason to go downtown,” said Pushelberg, who referenced the growing gallery scene in the area as an additional inspiration.
      The AC’s lobby is on the 34th floor of the buildingThe design follows a slew of other hotels designed for LA’s downtown, including Hotel Per La designed by Jaqui Seerman, which occupies a 1920s bank building.
      A division of Marriot, Moxy has dozens of hotels around the world, including a recent addition in New York’s Lower East Side designed by Michaelis Boyd and Rockwell Group.

      Read more: More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Rooms

      Michaelis Boyd captures “the spirit of the absurd” in Moxy Lower East Side

      by

      Hotel brand Moxy has opened its fifth venue in New York City, with an eclectic design that includes a rooftop bar filled with plants and a piano room lined in blue velvet.

      Architecture and design studio Michaelis Boyd spearheaded the interior design of Moxy Lower East Side, while Rockwell Group designed two of its restaurants and Stonehill Taylor oversaw the architectural works.
      The ambition was to push the playful design of the Moxy brand even further than its sister venues, reflecting the vibrancy of the Bowery, where the Lower East Side meets SoHo.
      The Highlight Room is a rooftop bar with a palm tree at its centreThe 303-room hotel brings together different styles and narratives to create a “spirit of the absurd”.
      “We wanted to create a quirky yet stylish play on the absurd,” said Rina Kukaj, NY director at Michaelis Boyd.

      “The goal was a design that’s up to date but nods to the Bowery’s past, with a good dose of Moxy’s trademark whimsy and elements of surprise,” she told Dezeen.
      Silver Linings is a piano lounge furnished with blue velvet banquettes and curtainsMoxy is a subsidiary of hotel chain Marriott International, aimed at a younger market more focused on modern lifestyle experiences than traditional forms of luxury.
      Developed by real-estate company Lightstone, the hotel features four restaurant and bar venues, a lobby lounge with a bar and all-day cafe, and three studios that can be used for meetings, co-working or hospitality.
      Plants hang from the ceiling in the lobby”The Lower East Side has always been iconically cool,” said Mitchell Hochberg, president of Lightstone. “We saw it as the next logical frontier for Moxy.”
      “People come to the neighbourhood to indulge their thirst for discovery, and they’ll get that at the Moxy too.”
      The lobby lounge is brought to life by “hipster animals”In the lobby, a mix of seating types create opportunities for lounging, working or socialising, dotted amongst details that include game tables, overhead plants, “hipster animals” and chandeliers featuring 3D-printed pin-up girls.
      “We wanted to create a contemporary, leafy oasis,” said Michaelis Boyd co-founder, Alex Michaelis.

      Rockwell Group and Yabu Pushelberg team up for Moxy Chelsea hotel

      “As you walk through the lobby, wherever your eye takes you, you’ll see things happening,” he told Dezeen.
      “Hanging plantings overhead, a circular pattern on the terrazzo floor, and dome light fixtures that shine very softly down towards you. Guests are almost the artist at play, the focal point of the experience.”
      An all-day cafe, The Fix, can be found within the lobbySilver Lining is a lobby-adjacent piano lounge, furnished with blue velvet banquettes and curtains, and featuring imagery that references the life and work of Bowery’s one-time resident, Andy Warhol.
      “Silver Lining is sumptuous and sophisticated; it feels really intimate,” said Kukaj.
      Sake No Hana features Kimono-inspired tapestries and lantern-like pendantsRockwell Group took charge of Sake No Hana, a Japanese restaurant that combines references to New York’s 1980s punk scene and Japanese street culture.
      Kimono-inspired tapestries and lantern-like pendants light hang from the ceiling, while a pair of symmetric curving staircases wrap a blue-tiled bar.
      Loosie’s is a basement bar and club with an “exploded disco ball” chandelierLoosie’s – a basement bar and club – is Rockwell Group’s other contribution. This dark, atmospheric space centres around an “exploded disco ball” chandelier.
      On the 16th floor, Michaelis Boyd designed The Highlight Room to feel like a 19th-century pleasure garden. A palm tree is at the centre of this rooftop bar.
      Studios can be used for meetings, co-working or hospitality”We wanted to recreate this sense of a hidden garden amidst the rooftops,” said Kukaj.
      “Hanging plants and fabric lanterns sway from the ceiling above the bar, foliage springs from hidden corners and, at the centre, a majestic tree spreads its branches towards all four corners of the room.”
      The hotel has 303 bedrooms, with details including coloured glass screensMoxy Lower East Side is completed by simple and pared-back guest rooms. There are only a few design flourishes here – like the Hollywood-style lighting and coloured glass screens.
      The Moxy brand has been in New York since 2018, when it opened the Yabu Pushelberg-designed Moxy Times Square.
      Rockwell Group has created restaurants for all four New York venues and oversaw the entire design of Moxy East Village.
      Bedrooms feature Hollywood-style lighting and lava stone sinksFor Michaelis Boyd, Moxy Lower East Side is its first completed collaboration with the brand. The London and New York-based studio has previously created interiors for Soho House and The Williamsburg Hotel.
      “We’re known for our work with Soho House and although the communal spaces of the hotel are open to the public, in places we wanted to create the intimate feel of a member’s club,” added Kukaj.
      Moxy Lower East Side is the brand’s fourth hotel in New York”As for the guest rooms, they are designed as the quiet moment within the hotel, a step back from all the activity,” she added.
      Moxy Lower East Side opened in October and was the venue for Heidi Klum’s 2022 Halloween Party – where the supermodel memorably dressed in a head-to-toe worm costume.
      The photography is by Michael Kleinberg.

      Read more: More