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 The Chambers Hotel and the restaurant inside it display once again the set-designer touch of David Rockwell. December 2001
I don't say that to be critical. The Chambers is very good (although I wouldn't say that about all of the artwork on display). The architecture and interior design have the quality that David Rockwell has exemplified again and again--the perfect pitch of a set designer. Rockwell gets the details exactly right, and he knows how to make places feel good. The Chambers isn't too elegant, too raw, too uptown, too downtown, too retro, or too cutting edge. The proportions are right, and all the elements are skillfully wrought. There is no desperate striving to be Philippe Starck here, yet there isn't any timidity either. The Chambers has an amiable panache. It is intended to be a modern hotel for people who don't want to retreat into the boredom of the Sherry-Netherland, but who wouldn't mind being in the same neighborhood. I like the building, in part because it was once a parking garage--or at least the shell of a parking garage--and what Rockwell had to start with had a certain dumb, plain, middle-of-a-Midtown-block banality to it. Out of this tight, mean site he squeezed a building that has a reasonable amount of grandeur, dignity, even sumptuousness. It's big enough, at 14 stories, to have presence but small enough to have the intimacy that genuine boutiques must possess if they're going to compete in a lodgings market increasingly populated by corporate megaboutique hotels. When you're in the Chambers, you don't feel like you're in a Generation X version of a Sheraton. You feel like you are in a unique place. Yet--and here we get into what marks Rockwell's work more than anything--you don't feel as if you are in a bizarre place. The Chambers looks almost familiar (because you think maybe you saw it in some movie). One could call Rockwell's work generic, but that doesn't do it justice. Almost all of his projects--the first W hotel in Midtown, Nobu in Tribeca, Vong, Ruby Foo's, Monkey Bar--have a rightness to them. Although Rockwell hasn't invented a new vocabulary, he has an uncanny ability to read the architectural languages that are out there and know exactly what to do with them. He understands the basics of proportion, scale, movement, and light. And he knows exactly how strong to make the motif, while making sure it doesn't overwhelm everything else. Rockwell's restaurants and other public places never seem to be trying too hard--he makes artifice seem natural. The centerpiece of the Chambers is the restaurant Town, which you could describe as either stuck in the basement or placed in a glowing, magnificent, skylighted double-height room that Rockwell magically coaxed out of a tight space. The approach makes you feel that you are going someplace you do not want to go--you squeeze down a narrow passageway past a ground-floor bar, then descend a stairway and make a couple of turns--but once you get there, you realize that Rockwell has really pulled something off. The room is expansive, lit by day with natural light wafting down from the skylights and glowing at night with soft illumination from sconces and translucent wood-veneer panels. Like every modern restaurant that aims toward sensual luxury rather than austerity, Town owes a certain debt to the Four Seasons. But Rockwell has responded to Philip Johnson with originality and a sense of constant surprise. Rockwell plays with the 1950s and with light, and he seems to be having fun with the very idea of grandeur. He presents it almost straight, but not quite. Rockwell is able to indulge in modern elegance and to make gentle fun of it at the same time. You feel him celebrating with a whiff of irony. It's not easy to do both of these things at the same time, but it's an endearing combination. Part of the space is tucked under a balcony that overlooks the restaurant from the bar area, and another part is open to full height. The room--like the plot of the hotel--is tight and narrow, but it doesn't feel as constrained as many similarly shaped rooms do. The light and the softness of the walls, which have suede panels in a grid pattern and hanging glass beads, make the space work. So do the ample, well-spaced tables, which call to mind a bigger room. Town, which is owned by the chef Geoffrey Zakarian, has ambitions that extend beyond the hotel--this is, after all, a 95-seat restaurant in a 77-room hotel, so it needs to attract plenty of nonguests to survive. Placing it below ground and in the back, without a major sign on the street, was a gutsy move. But where else could you build a grand enough space on this tiny piece of property? Rockwell and the developers, Ira Drukier and Richard Born, were right not to give up the lobby, which isn't big enough to hold a restaurant anyway. And you can't blame them for not wanting to devote an upper floor to a restaurant, which would have meant giving up guest rooms and ending up with a much more conventional dining space. By tucking the restaurant behind the building, Rockwell was able to obtain more space and natural light. The restaurant does, in fact, have its own entrance, through a small door on the left of Rockwell's symmetrical limestone facade. But I suspect many diners will enter through the enormous double-height main doors in the center, designed in a basket-weave pattern of walnut with inlaid panels of glass. They're imposing, sleek, and rustic at the same time. Their tone, if not their scale, is carried through the two-story lobby, which mixes leather, dark wood, and white plaster with some discreet pieces of brass trim. There is a fireplace in the center and a balcony extending around three sides of the space. At its best, the combination of sleekness and roughness reminds one of Carlo Scarpa. Tibetan carpets complement an eclectic mix of modern furniture. The best places to sit are not the private nooks on the balcony--there isn't enough of a view to make the climb worthwhile--but the two small seating areas on either side of the front door, which are set in front of floor-to-ceiling glass panels facing the street. From inside, the panels look less like windows than huge screens with a rear-projection view of constantly moving street life. It is a marvelous experience to sit on Rockwell's heavily upholstered chairs, poised ambiguously between the enclosure of the lobby walls and entry vestibule and the sense of being right out on the sidewalk. The elevator cabs are lined in leather, with sides of glass open to the concrete elevator shafts--a mild bit of industrial-chic pretension that works. The corridors leading to the guest rooms are tiny--there are only eight rooms per floor--and each has been decorated by an up-and-coming artist. Bob and Roberta Smith's series of colorful signs containing slogans on the fourth floor ("UP IS THE NEW DOWN," "NOT ME, HIM") might grate on you if you had to see them every morning, but I found them entrancing. The same with the series of tiny objects Sheila Pepe has mounted on the walls of the seventh floor; they are intended to cast shadows that she uses as the basis for wall drawings. Although every floor is entirely different, the rooms are all essentially the same, save for two special spaces, one a spectacular duplex with a terrace on the 12th floor. The standard rooms are well designed, with glass showers, glass tabletops set on leather-covered sawhorses, and sleek silver televisions. The bathrooms have rough concrete floors, inlaid handmade glass tiles, and Italian bowl-mounted sinks. It's definitely fantasy Tribeca loft time here, but the bedrooms are comfortable and the theme isn't overbearing. You don't feel physically squeezed into an awkward space that doesn't work--nor do you feel conceptually squeezed. And this isn't the sort of place where you feel ridiculous if you're not wearing Prada. It's a much softer sell: the Chambers lets you dip your toe into the water of New York trendiness gently. |
