Best Seats In The House

Best Seats In The House
By Donna Paul
Published: January, 2006
Interior Design
Architecture and stage sets are David Rockwell's métiers.
Combining them, taking essential elements from each in a
kind of alchemy, is his imprimatur. And that's evident the
moment you pass beneath the theater-style glass marquee of
New York's Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue, then
through the revolving door. The man behind Broadway sets
for The Rocky Horror Show and Hairspray, Rockwell used
curtains, scrims, scaffolding, and, of course, spotlights
throughout phase one of his Carlton renovation: building a
17,000-square-foot three-story annex, which now houses a
new lobby and meeting rooms, and designing a 7,000square-foot duplex restaurant for star chef Geoffrey
Zakarian, next door in the original beaux arts hotel.
At New York's Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue,
limestone steps descend to the lobby, part of a three-story
17,000-square-foot annex by the Rockwell Group. All the
seating is custom, as is the nylon rug.
"The old building was the main attraction, so we needed to
integrate it with the annex," he explains. "We had to
discover the old building's unique DNA and use it to tie the
two together." Unearthing mosaic tile floors and elaborate
egg-and-dart molding during the renovation helped the
Rockwell Group produce that seamlessness. The result is
genuine synergy. As you move from lobby to restaurant,
new and old are often difficult to tell apart. The historical
gets woven with the contemporary for a "feel of something
that evolved over time," Rockwell says.
It's equally difficult to draw the line between performer and
audience, stage sets and box seats. As the triple-height
lobby and the restaurant were designed to open to each
other, hotel guests arriving down the curving stairs can look
up and see diners on the balcony of the second-floor main
dining room. For diners looking down on hotel guests
checking in, it's the same voyeuristic thrill in reverse.
Adding to the human drama in the lobby, Rockwell
designed a multilayered focal wall built around a 24-foothigh black-and-white archival photograph of the original
hotel-the facade's terra-cotta details and bands of brick
anchoring a stretch of Madison Avenue. He backlit the
image, which is printed on a scrim, and covered it with a
sheet of textured glass; water flows down the glass into a
limestone trough where Rockwell placed polished river
rocks and a row of up-lights. Above the waterfall, stenciled
panels look like café au lait damask. A pair of columns
wrapped in gray faux suede complete the composition.
The original hotel building's Country restaurant, also a
David Rockwell design, with its Tiffany bar, nicknamed for
the restored dome.
Guests lounging on the lobby's sofas and wing chairs can
contemplate the waterfall or turn the opposite way for a
glimpse of Rockwell's most dazzling discovery, the stainedglass dome above the restaurant's main dining room. With
colored pieces now attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany and
other parts to a turn-of-the-last century Indiana glassmaker,
the 200-square-foot dome was hidden for years by a
dropped ceiling, and much of the glass in the pattern of
grapes and trellises was shattered or missing. "Uncovering
this really fantastic skylight was one of my favorite
moments, definitely a pinnacle of the design process,"
recalls Rockwell, who also learned while delving into the
building's history that the dome had once topped a
gentlemen's barroom. "It took more than eight months to
remove the layers of tobacco tar and dirt. They were so
thick that, initially, it looked like black paint."
Country's wine room. Frosted-acrylic boxes encasing crystal
chandeliers in the main dining room, near the open kitchen.
As an ensemble, the main dining room and the café beneath
have a name that suggests a more casual establishment than
Rockwell's first restaurant design for Zakarian: That one,
uptown at the Chambers hotel, is called Town; this one is
Country. Still, Country's main dining room is naturally more
formal than the café, a difference reflected most vividly in
the lighting. Above the white cloths of tables in the dining
room, pendant fixtures' frosted-acrylic boxes encase
sparkling period-style crystal chandeliers. (This
juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary picks up on a
treatment in the lobby, where old-fashioned crystal
chandeliers hang inside cylindrical stainless-steel mesh
shades.) Down in the café, the layered approach reappears,
but this time it's fabric-wrapped cubes in clear acrylic boxes
that cast their light on marble or walnut tabletops, Harry
Bertoia's bar stools, and oak flooring wire-brushed in an
overscale herringbone pattern. Over the bar, a translucent
acrylic shelf glows like a light box, silhouetting the bottles
inside. "I'm taking a romantic look forward to what hotels
and public space in general can become," Rockwell says.
"There's no defined period. You can breathe your own
fantasy into it."
An Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni lamp, an Arne
Jacobsen chair, and a leather-covered chesterfield in the café
The restaurant's original mosaic flooring.
In the lobby, a 24-foot-high waterfall incorporates an
archival photograph printed on a fabric scrim that's covered
by a sheet of textured glass; water flows down the glass into
a limestone trough, and the entire composition is backlit by
six wheels of fiber-optic lighting. Above the waterfall,
stenciled panels imitate damask.
The café bar's incandescent-lit acrylic top shelf rings a pair
of columns distinguished by Venetian plaster.
The champagne lounge's custom leather-upholstered
seating.
The bar in the ground-level café combines a zinc top and a
leather-upholstered face.
Pendant fixtures composed of a linen-wrapped box inside an
acrylic one.
Harry Bertoia's stools lining the café's floor of wire-brushed
oak.
The 40-foot-long bridge of tempered glass, 11/2 inches
thick, that connects the main dining room and the
champagne lounge.
The upholstered column rising between the main dining
room's balcony and the lobby's focal wall.