Highly anticipated Hotel Marcel, A Tapestry Hotel by Hilton, will be opening its doors in April 2022.
Hotel Marcel will be operated by Chesapeake Hospitality and join Tapestry Collection by Hilton, an upscale portfolio of more than 70 handpicked, original hotels.
An icon of Brutalist architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, the building has a storied past.
Completed in 1970 by Bauhaus designer and architect Marcel Breuer to house the headquarters of the Armstrong Rubber Company, it sat empty for decades, with a large portion of the structure demolished at one point to make way for a parking lot.
The Pirelli Building, as it became known, is now getting a new life as the country’s first net-zero energy hotel.
Hotel Marcel will be one of only about a dozen LEED Platinum certified hotels in the United States.
The hotel will be all-electric, generating 100% of its own electricity and energy for heat and hot water with a rooftop solar array and solar parking canopies.
Hotel Marcel will also include many cutting-edge technologies to modernize the building, including Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting system, renewable on-site energy generation, plus extensive upgrades to enhance interior temperature control and air quality.
The building’s Energy Use Intensity (EUI) rating is projected to be 34 kBtu per square foot -- 80% less energy than median EUI for hotels in the United States.
See Also: You Can Now Buy Upcycled Prada, Gucci, and Celine For As Low As $200
“With the climate crisis and continued use of fossil fuels posing an existential threat to humanity, I felt an obligation to build a building that can serve as a model for environmental sustainability,” said Bruce Redman Becker of Becker + Becker.
“The question should not be why are we doing this but why isn’t everyone else?”
Purchased in 2020 by architect and developer Bruce Redman, the hotel will feature 165 guest rooms and suites, a full-service new American restaurant and bar, and a lounge, and 7,000 square feet of meeting and event space with a penthouse courtyard and galleries.
The property’s design is a collaboration between Becker + Becker, project architect, and New York City-based interior design and branding studio Dutch East Design, founded by visionaries Larah Moravek, Dieter Cartwright, and William Oberlin.
Throughout the hotel, nods to Marcel Breuer’s pioneering work at the Bauhaus are intentional, from custom carpets with an over-scaled Bauhaus-inspired graphic found in the suites to the chevron patterns on the standard guest room carpeting.
The Dutch East team also incorporated the angular geometry of the exterior window panels into the wood detailing on the interior, celebrating Breuer’s brutalist language in the guestroom corridor ceiling panels.
“It is a rare opportunity to be offered such an iconic structure to reimagine into a hotel,'' said Larah Moravek, co-founder, Dutch East Design.
“We wanted to honor the distinct architecture and celebrate the building in all its glory. We took an intentional position to allow the interiors to be the soft underbelly of the Brutalist exoskeleton.”
Hotel Marcel is located at 500 Sargent Drive adjacent to New Haven’s Wooster Square neighborhood and the city’s waterfront.
Bookings are now live at the link here with rates beginning at $229.
Photography by: Courtesy Hotel Marcel
