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The Brutalist framework is shot through with nostalgic references to the roaring ’20s and glamorous ’30s, What lends the hotel a distinctly contemporary edge is its exotic touch. Original features have been imaginatively restored, contributing to the hotel’s overarching sensorial experience, which in turn offers an expressive journey through both the vintage and the modern. The former publisher’s print drying beam, for example, now runs through the trees and foliage that dominate the hotel’s tropical, five-storey atrium. The lobby is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, meticulously stacked with thousands of books from fiction, non-fiction, guides, novels, biographies and beyond. The resulting aesthetic is imaginative and industrial in equal doses, with various pockets of the property presenting a museum-like quality in which guests have ample opportunity to absorb this ode to an historic building.
