UK-based Firmdale Hotels recently announced that the Crosby Street Hotel has earned the first LEED Gold rating for a New York City hotel. It’s also the first hotel anywhere in New York State to cop the honor from USGBC. The 11-story, 86-unit luxury property, which was Firmdale’s first foray into the inventory-constrained Gotham hospitality market, opened in late 2009 on Crosby Street in SoHo. Designed by Stonehill & Taylor Architects & Planners, with interiors by Firmdale co-founder Kit Kemp, the 85,000-square-foot hotel was built on what was formerly a parking lot between Prince and Spring Streets.
Presently there is no LEED for Hotels. So even though the green design features at the Crosby are more or less LEED-standard, they are notable in light of the structure’s use. Stone and soil used during construction and landscaping was sourced locally, and construction debris was recycled. Landscaping features native plants and vegetation which is irrigated efficiently. The hotel also purchases clean electricity, was built with recycled-content structural materials, and offers guests a green roof and other outdoor space.
Kemp’s interior design included the creation of 40 different schemes for the guest rooms that mix genres and an aesthetic that draws from both sides of the Atlantic. The terrace of Suite 203 – dubbed “The Meadow Suite” – is only accessible to that unit’s guests, but features 50 different native flowering plants that blossom at various times of the year. The hotel also offers a 99-seat screening room, meeting rooms, a guest library, drawing rooms, and a lobby bar and restaurant.
The Crosby Street Hotel is actually just the second LEED-certified hotel in New York City (the first is unclear because of a “confidential” label on the project in USGBC’s public database). Stonehill & Taylor has designed three other LEED-hopeful hotels in Manhattan: The NoMad, just north of Madison Square Park; the Broadway Hotel at West 94th Street, and the Fifteenth Street Hotel.
Is the Element Times Square the ‘first’ LEED certified hotel in NYC that showed up as “confidential” on the USGBC list? I wonder why they’d do that?
I actually think it might be one of the other Stonehill & Taylor projects, but either way I agree it’s odd that they wouldn’t want the publicity. Might just be a hiccup in USGBC’s database. We’ll see what we can dig up.