Many plans for reviving the neglected centers of America's small and medium-size cities involve building new museums, restaurants, and hotels to bring life to deserted sidewalks, but the architects and hoteliers behind the 21c Museum Hotel group found a winning formula in combining all three in one venue. For the flagship in downtown Louisville, the art collector-owners Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson hired New York–based Deborah Berke Partners to design a unique project that is equal part hotel and contemporary art museum, anchored to the street by a destination restaurant.
“We had been going to Basel and to Bilbao, and we saw how art and travel played a role in the commerce and vitality of other communities,” says Wilson. “We wanted to do the same thing in Louisville.”
The concept has created its own ecosystem, with the hotel bringing new people to the neighborhood throughout the day, locals arriving to eat and drink at the restaurant, and everyone exploring Brown and Wilson's collection in the public spaces and dedicated galleries, which all are free to enter. The model was successful enough that Berke and 21c went on to collaborate on projects in Cincinnati, completed in 2012, and in Bentonville, Arkansas, which opened early last year. All of the hotels had occupancy rates exceeding 60 percent in 2013 and revenues per available room (a key measure of a hotel's success) at the top of their markets. The owners now plan to expand on the model, opening three more Berke-designed projects in the next two years. “We like downtown sites, and that's where 21c really works,” says Berke. “It brings a youthful energy on lots of different levels: the cooking, the art, the attitude.”
The pairing of Berke's sophisticated minimalist aesthetic with the owners' taste for colorful, sometimes confrontational, and frequently playful contemporary art ties the projects together, but each responds to a unique set of urban conditions. In Louisville, Berke's firm combined five 19th-century warehouse structures into a single hotel with a two-story gallery space at its heart. In Cincinnati, Berke renovated the century-old Metropole Hotel, restoring its facade and foregrounding its most interesting architectural space, an original light well lined with glazed white brick. And a newly constructed Bentonville building picks up the low-slung scale of the town square and connects the streetscape to a path that leads to the Moshe Safdie–designed Crystal Bridges Museum of Art.
With the next crop of hotels, Berke is working with a pedigreed set of existing buildings. Early next year, 21c will open in a converted Durham, North Carolina, bank building (originally designed by Empire State Building architects Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon). Her firm is also currently renovating a McKim, Mead, and White bank in Lexington, Kentucky. And in Oklahoma City, the firm is taking advantage of the massive spans inside an Albert Kahn automobile plant for another 21c. “We're planning to show really big artwork that you can walk around in the hotel spaces,” she says. “We're also playing with rubber and automobile belts.”
Though 21c has found success in smaller cities, Wilson thinks the formula will work in bigger markets as well, though, so far, no plans have been announced. “Lots of hotels in coastal cities use art as decoration, but no one is incorporating it the way we are,” says Wilson. “We now think we're ready for those cities.”
Architect:
Deborah Berke Partners
220 Fifth Avenue
7th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Size: Louisville: 100,200 square feet; Cincinnati: 159,200 square feet; Bentonville: 99,900 square feet
Completion Date:Louisville: 2006; Cincinnati: 2012; Bentonville: 2013
