A Boutique Hotel Grows in Brooklyn

"We’re not trying to be trendy,” said Neil Shah, president of Hersha Hospitality Trust, standing in the modish lobby of the company’s stylishly titled Nu Hotel at 85 Smith Street.

Fashionably decorated with found objects from the neighborhood and outfitted with eco-friendly cork flooring, organic bedding and custom furnishings made from recycled teak wood, Hersha’s 93-room lodge opened earlier this year with an immediate claim to landmark status—“downtown Brooklyn’s first boutique hotel.”

But not too boutique-ish.

“You walk around this place, it’s cool design, it’s interesting design, but it’s not what’s become of boutique hotel design,” Mr. Shah insisted.

Mingling among guests in a pinstriped suit and orange tie at the hotel’s grand opening party on Sept. 23, the 34-year-old hotel exec suggested that the once innovative, often imitated and now increasingly pervasive model of high design and hipster appeal pioneered nearly a quarter of a century ago by Morgans Hotel founder Ian Schrager had almost reached the point of self-parody.

“Boutique hotel design is either the most minimalist palette, or it’s kind of this over-the-top design where your designers design every single corner without thinking about function,” Mr. Shah said.

Function is not lost at Hersha’s Nu Hotel, however. Nor multi-function. Take the lobby area, for instance, which moonlights as a cocktail lounge. “We have a small bar,” he noted, “and tapas throughout the evening.”

The next one, he promised, will include a full-scale restaurant.

Coupled with the intimate 45-room Duane Street Hotel, which opened in Tribeca last December, and Philadelphia’s new Independent, the Nu Hotel represented a fresh brand of product, at least for Hersha, a growing “independent collection of hotels” in a nearly $1.2 billion portfolio otherwise dominated by national chains—Marriotts, Hiltons, Holiday Inns—more than 60 of them, from Boston to Scottsdale, Ariz.

“These locations,” Mr. Shah said of the company’s newer boutique properties, “deserve something other than a branded hotel and something other than a lifestyle hotel and really something that’s more authentic and more local.”

Two more local properties are under development in much the same fashion; one, in partnership with prolific hotel-chain builder Sam Chang, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and East 13th Street, near Union Square; the other, farther uptown at Lexington Avenue and East 48th Street.

WHILE NEITHER Hersha-led project can certainly claim to be the first, nor probably the last, to file itself under the ever-popular boutique category, Mr. Shah can at least boast about bucking one prevailing industry trend.

At a time when many developers are mothballing or altogether abandoning hotel projects under the strain of tight credit markets—an estimated rollback of more than 30 percent of planned projects in Manhattan alone, according to a report released last week by CB Richard Ellis Hotels—his Philadelphia-based real estate investment trust, which since 2007 has also snatched up Hotel 373 on Fifth Avenue and the Sheraton JFK Airport Hotel in Queens, is still hungry for more. Next Page >